Wit 


THE   BEACON   BIOGRAPHIES 

EDITED    BY 

M.  A.  DEWOLFE  HOWE 


JAMES  RUSSELL  LOWELL 


BY 


EDWARD  EVERETT  HALE,  JR. 


tstf/ntttt/-   $£&0*9i/U9*9y 


.Ar^^^J^To^-  "Dv9^ 


JAMES  RUSSELL  LOWELL 


BY 


EDWARD  EVERETT  HALE,  JR. 


S*T\  B  R  A 

~   OF  THE 

UNIVERSITY 


BOSTON 

SMALL,   MAYNARD  &  COMPANY 
MDCCCXCIX 


Copyright,  1899 
By  Small,  Maynard  £ff  Company 

Entered  at  Stationers'  Hall 


Press  of 
George  H.  Ellis,  Boston 


The  photogravure  used  as  a  frontispiece 
to  this  volume  is  from  a  photograph  taken 
during  the  summer  of  1891  by  Pach 
Brothers,  Cambridge.  The  present  engrav 
ing  is  by  John  Andrew  &  Son,  Boston. 


1  J  A  Q  O  • 


)O  / 


PEEFACE. 

There  are  already  several  excellent  books 
on  Lowell,  and  there  will  be  many  more. 
A  real  life  of  him  by  a  contemporary  we 
should  like,  but  now  shall  probably  never 
have.  Professor  Norton  and  my  father 
have  in  different  ways  done  much  to  fill  the 
lack,  so  that  we  may  get  some  idea  of  how 
Lowell  appeared  to  those  of  his  own  time, — 
those  who  began  when  he  began  and  lived 
through  what  he  lived  through.  What  is 
next  wanted  (and  every  year  makes  the 
chance  of  it  rarer)  is  a  life  by  some  one 
of  those  younger  men  of  letters, — Mr.  How- 
ells,  for  instance,  or  Mr.  Stedman, — men 
of  the  literary  generation  just  following 
Loivell,  who  began  their  work  in  friendship 
with  him  avid  in  the  encouragement  of  his 
interest,  and  whose  warm  personal  opinion, 
ripened  now,  and  with  the  perspective  of  a 
dozen  years,  would  give  as  nearly  a  true 
idea  of  Lowell  as  one  would  want.  It  need 
not  be  said  that  the  following  essay  makes 
no  attempt  to  realize  either  of  these  possi- 


viii  PEEFACE 

Ulities.     This   is  but   one   of  the   lives   of 
Lowell  written  by  posterity. 

I  have  written,  then,  from  a  position 
which  has  disadvantages  as  well  as  advan 
tages.  It  is  true  that  I  cannot  for  an 
instant  think  or  write  of  Lowell  as  Pro 
fessor  Norton  or  Mr.  Howells  can,  and 
could  not,  had  I  their  knoivledge  and  appre 
ciation.  But,  then,  it  is  also  true  that  they 
cannot  think  of  Lowell  or  write  of  him  as  I 
can.  By  the  time  I  began  to  be  interested 
in  literature  Lowell  was  already  a  classic ; 
and  I  regarded  him  practically  as  such, 
which  means  a  great  deal.  Such  a  way  of 
regarding  him  is  not  necessarily  better  than 
the  way  in  which  his  friends  thought  of  him. 
Certainly  not  that;  but  it  is  different,  and 
witli  a  very  natural  and  rational  difference. 
It  is,  moreover,  the  way  Lowell  must  more 
and  more  come  to  be  regarded  as  time  goes 
on.  Lowell  can  no  longer  be  one  of  the 
living  forces  of  our  own  generation.  He 
can  no  longer  be  even  a  present  inspiration. 
He  is  already  and  must  remain  a  classic, 


PEEFACE  ix 

with  all  the  advantages  and  drawbacks  at- 
tendant. 

A  keen  observer  has  said,  in  speaking  of 
Lowell  as  a  man,  that  you  had  to  surrender 
yourself  to  his  influence  before  he  approved 
of  you  and  allowed  you  to  get  his  best. 
After  that  he  teas  very  glad  to  reveal  him 
self.  I  am  not  quite  sure  that  I  have  sub 
mitted  to  his  influence.  I  rather  hope  not. 
But  I  also  hope,  all  the  same,  that,  in  a 
way,  I  have  got  the  best  of  him  that  is  now 
possible.  That  is  what  I  want, —  all,  I 
think,  that  any  one  should  now  ask.  In 
this  essay  much  has  of  necessity  been  left 
out ;  but  it  has  been  my  aim  to  seize  those 
characteristics  and  qualities  which  must  en 
dure,  and  which  will  make  him  a  necessity 
to  those  who  live  after  him. 

EDWARD   E.    HALE,    JR. 
UNION  COLLEGE,  March  8,  1899. 


CHRONOLOGY. 

1819 
February  22.  James  Russell  Lowell  was 

born. 

1828 

Entered  Mr.  Wells' s  school. 

1834 
Admitted  to  Harvard  College. 

1838 

June.  Rusticated,  and  sent  to  Concord. 
August.  Class  poem. 

1838-40 
Attended  the  Harvard  Law  School. 

1841 

January.  Published  A   Year's   Life,  and 
Oilier  Poems. 

November.  Began  contributing  "  The  Old 
Dramatists"   and   other   articles  to   the 

Boston  Miscellany. 

1842 

January.  Began  editing  the  Pioneer. 
March.  Left  the  Pioneer. 
October.  Severed  his  connection  with  the 
Boston  Miscellany. 


xii  CHEOKOLOGY 

1843 
December.  Published  " Poems.'7 

1844 

December  26.  Marriage  to  Miss  Maria 
White,  of  Watertown. 

1845 

January.  Published  the  Conversations  on 
Some  of  the  Old  Poets. 

1845-46 

Lived  in  Philadelphia  during  the  winter 
and  began  to  write  for  the  Pennsylvania 
Freeman. 

1846 

June.  Published  the  first  of  "The  Big- 
low  Papers "  in  the  Boston  Courier,  and 
began  to  write  for  the  Anti-slavery  Stand 
ard. 

1847 
November.  Began  A  Fable  for  Critics. 

1848 

November.  Published  A  Fable  for  Critics 
and  The  Biglow  Papers. 
December.  Published  The  Legend  of  Sir 
Launfal  and  Poems  in  two  volumes. 


CHRONOLOGY  xiii 

1851 
July.  Went  to  Europe. 

1852 

October.  Returned  to  his  home  at  Elm- 
wood. 

1853 

October.  Mrs.  Lowell  died. 

November.  Published      "A     Moosehead 

Journal "  in  Putnam's  Magazine. 

1854 

January.  Began  the  Lowell  Lectures  in 
Boston.  His  appointment  to  chair  of 
belles-lettres  at  Harvard  determined  on. 
April.  Published  "  Cambridge  Thirty 
Years  Ago"  in  Putnam's  Magazine. 

1855 

March.  Published    "Leaves    from     my 
Journal"  in  Graham' s  Magazine. 
July.  Went  to   Europe  for  the  second 
time. 

1855-56 

Spent  the  winter  in  Dresden,  and  went 
to  Italy  in  the  spring. 


xiv  CHRONOLOGY 

1856 
August.  Returned  to  Cambridge. 

1857 

Married  Miss  Frances  Dunlap,  of  Port 
land. 

November.  As  editor,  published  the  first 
number  of  the  Atlantic  Monthly. 

1858 
August.  Published  The  Pocket  Celebration 

of  the  Fourth. 

1860 

October.  Published  The  Election   in   No 
vember. 

1861 

June.  Edited  the  Atlantic  Monthly  for  the 
last  time. 

Published  the  first  Biglow  Papers  of  the 
second  series. 

1864 

Undertook   with   Charles  Eliot  Norton, 
the  editorship  of  the  North  American  Ee~ 
view. 
Published  the  Fireside  Travels. 


CHEONOLOGY  xv 

1865 

July.  Wrote  and  delivered  the  Commem 
oration  Ode. 

1867 
Published    The   Biglow    Papers,    second 

series. 

1868 
Published  Under  the  Willows. 

1870 

Published  The  Cathedral  and  Among  My 
Books. 

1871 

Published  My  Study  Windows. 

1872 

April.  Eesigned  the  editorship    of    the 
North  American  Review. 
July.  Went  to  Europe,   and  spent  the 
following  winter  in  Paris. 

1873 

June.  Eeceived  the  degree    of   D.C.L. 
from  Oxford. 

1874 

June.  Eeceived   the    degree    of    LL.D. 
from  Cambridge. 


xvi  CHBONOLOGY 

1874  (continued) 
July  4.  Eeturned  home  to  Elmwood. 

1875 

April  17.  Delivered  the  Centennial  Ode  at 
Lexington. 

July  3.  Delivered  Under  the  Old  Elm. 
Published  Among  My  Books,  second  se 
ries. 

1876 

June.  Went  as  a  delegate  to  the  National 
Eepublican  Convention. 
July  4.  Delivered  the  Ode  for  the  Fourth 
of  July. 

1877 

February.  Delivered    lectures    at   Johns 
Hopkins  University. 
July.  Left  for  Spain  as  United   States 
minister. 

1878 

April-July.  Travelled  in  Southern  Eu 
rope,  reaching  Constantinople  and  Ath 
ens. 

1880 
January.  Named  minister  to  England. 


CHRONOLOGY  xvii 

1881 

October-December.  Made  a  vacation  tour 
through  Germany  and  Italy. 

1884 

April.  Eeceived  the  degree  of  LL.D. 
from  Edinburgh. 

June.  Eeceived  the  degree  of  LL.D. 
from  Harvard. 

1885 

February.  Mrs.  Lowell  died. 
May.  Eeturned  to  America,  to  Deerfoot 
Farm,  Southboro,  Mass. 

1886 

November  8.  Spoke  at  the  two  hundred 
and  fiftieth  anniversary  of  the  founding 
of  Harvard  College. 

1887 

Published  Heartsease  and  Eue  and  De 
mocracy  and  Other  Addresses. 

1888-89 

Passed  the  winter  quietly  at  his  books  in 
Boston. 


xviii  CHEONOLOGY 

1889 

June.  Made  his  last  visit  to  England.  - 
November.  Eeturned  home  to  Elmwood. 

1890 

April-May.  Edited  the  Riverside  Edition 
of  his  Works. 

1891 

Published  Literary  and  Political  Addresses. 
August  12.  James  Eussell  Lowell  died  at 
Elmwood. 


JAMES  RUSSELL  LOWELL 


OF 

FO 

JAMES    RUSSELL   LOWELL. 

I. 

A  CERTAIN  lady,  who  was  going  to 
write  the  life  of  a  friend  who  had  been 
a  famous  mathematician,  told  Ibsen  of 
her  plan.  The  imaginative  dramatist 
exclaimed,  — 

"Is  it  her  biography,  in  the  ordinary 
sense  of  the  word,  which  you  intend  to 
write,  or  is  it  not  rather  a  poem  about 
her?" 

A  poem  instead  of  an  ordinary  biogra 
phy,  —  that,  surely,  would  be  the  happy 
privilege  of  a  poet.  Lowell  himself, 
when  he  desired  to  commemorate  the 
life  of  Agassiz,  wrote  a  poem  about  him  ; 
and  who  will  say  that  as  much  truth  is 
not  in  these  verses  of  his  as  may  be 
found  in  any  excellent  article  on  the 
same  subject  in  some  encyclopaedia  f 
But  to  write  a  poem  about  a  man  or  on 
any  other  subject  is  not  allowed  to  all, 
even  with  the  greatest  freedom  of 


2       JAMES   RUSSELL  LOWELL 
speech :  it  is  a  very  restricted  privilege,  j 
—  the  privilege  of  such  as  are   able   to 
do  so. 

Ordinary  people,  however,  may  fort-  j 
unately  turn  the  matter  inside  out,  as 
it  were,  and  still  keep  the  spirit  of  the  i 
thing.  We  have  as  good  authority  as 
Ibsen  even.  A  good  while  ago  now, 
John  Milton  (looking  forward  to  living 
his  own  life  rather  than  writing  about 
the  life  of  somebody  else)  thought 
"that  he  who  would  not  be  frustrate 
of  his  hope  to  write  well  hereafter  in 
laudable  things  ought  himself  to  be  a 
true  poem;  that  is,  a  composition  and 
pattern  of  the  best  and  honorablest 
things,  not  presuming  to  sing  high 
praises  of  heroic  men  or  famous  cities, 
unless  he  have  in  himself  the  experi 
ence  and  practice  of  all  that  which  is 
praiseworthy. "  So  as  to  James  Kussell 
Lowell  it  is  hardly  necessary  to  write 
a  "poem  about  him,??  for  to  a  very 
great  degree  his  life  was  what  the 


or 
IFO 
JAMES   EUSSELL  LTAVELL      3 

older  poet  calls  a  poem.  Certainly  in 
our  recollection  of  him  there  is  nothing 
to  jar  the  harmonies  of  noble  ideal  and 
noble  living  that  his  life  presents.  He 
was  a  man  of  letters  and  a  student, 
deep  in  the  languages  and  literatures 
of  the  Old  World ;  and  he  was  also  a 
very  American  citizen,  zealous  and  vig 
orous  in  his  youth  and  full  of  wisdom 
in  his  later  years.  He  was  a  critic  who 
pronounced  judgment  and  a  satirist  who 
made  acceptance  of  his  judgment  by 
laughter ;  but  he  was  also  a  poet  not 
only  in  rhythms,  but  in  his  way  of 
thinking.  He  was  a  public  man,  a  man 
whose  daily  work  might  affect  thousands 
whom  he  never  saw,  and  of  whom  he 
never  heard,  but  he  was  also  one  of  the 
best  and  warmest  friends  in  private  life 
that  his  friends  ever  knew.  The  recol 
lection  of  such  a  life  must  needs  be 
very  like  a  poem  in  the  minds  of  the 
people  that  remember  him.  We  may 
call  it  a  poem,  though  not  set  to  verse ; 


4  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 
for  it  was  the  product  of  a  noble  nat 
ure,  and  because  the  appreciation  of  it 
ennobles  us.  Sidney  said  that  he  never 
heard  the  old  ballad  of  "  Chevy  Chase " 
but  that  his  heart  moved  more  than 
at  the  sound  of  a  trumpet ;  and  it  is  cer 
tainly  the  virtue  of  the  greatest  poetry 
to  arouse  and  vivify  the  human  spirit. 
But  even  the  truest  poems  of  LowelFs 
never  did  as  much  for  his  countrymen 
as  did  his  life,  so  far  as  it  could  well 
be  known. 

Ibsen,  going  on  to  speak  of  the  life 
of  the  mathematician,  said,  "You  must 
treat  the  subject  romantically."  This 
is  a  dark  saying.  The  man  who  is  real 
istic  in  fiction  advises  a  romantic  treat 
ment,  when  it  comes  to  facts.  How 
should  we  treat  the  life  of  Lowell  roman 
tically  1  Well,  if  it  comes  to  that,  how 
shall  we  treat  it  in  any  other  way, 
except  with  most  laborious  toiling  in 
authorities  and  assumption  of  the  Dry 
asdust  attitude,  which  would  serve  no 


JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL  5 
real  advantage  with  our  present  pur 
poses  f 

He  was  born  in  Cambridge,  it  is 
true,  not  so  very  long  ago,  in  a 
house  which  you  can  go  in  a  trolley 
car  and  see ;  and  yet,  so  far  as  concerns 
your  familiarity  with  circumstances  and 
conditions,  he  might  almost  as  well  have 
been  born  in  any  country  of  romance 
that  you  might  choose.  The  Cambridge 
of  those  days  is  not  the  Cambridge  we 
may  see  to-day.  That  little  town  and 
its  inhabitants  are  "as  thoroughly 
preterite  as  Romulus  or  Numa,"  "as 
shadowy  as  one  of  your  Etruscan  Lu- 
cumos  or  Roman  consuls,"  and  were 
so  half  a  century  ago,  when  Lowell  de 
scribed  them.  It  was  a  country  village, 
with  dignified  old  colonial  houses,  with 
horse-chestnuts  and  lindens  which  had 
had  to  stay  behind  when  the  Tories  went ; 
quiet,  unspeculative,  without  enterprise, 
sufficing  to  itself;  with  a  character  of 
its  own,  and  characters,  too,  and  with 


6       JAMES   RUSSELL   LOWELL 

its  native  festivals,  —  muster,  Cornwallis, 
and  August  Commencement,  as  being 
the  seat  of  the  oldest  college  in  the 
country.  So  Lowell  describes  the  Cam 
bridge  of  his  youth,  evidently  not  the 
Cambridge  that  we  think  of  now,  as  the 
Boston  of  that  time  was  not  the  Boston 
of  to-day,  and,  we  might  add,  as  the 
United  States  of  1820  was  not  our 
country  as  we  think  of  her  to-day. 

Cambridge  in  the  year  1819  —  when 
Lowell  was  born,  on  the  22d  of  Feb 
ruary —  was  a  town  of  about  four  thou 
sand  inhabitants.  Boston,  in  which  town 
his  father  was  pastor  of  the  West  Church, 
had  about  fifteen  times  as  many.  Har 
vard  College,  when  Lowell  entered  it, 
had,  perhaps,  one-eighth  as  many  stu 
dents  as  it  has  now  5  and  the  whole 
country  had  a  population  not  much 
greater  in  proportion.  But  it  is  not 
only  the  change  which  comes  first  to 
our  mind  that  we  must  remember.  We 
must  remember  other  immense  differ- 


JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL      7 

ences  in  the  time.  It  was  in  1820  that 
the  Missouri  Compromise  was  passed, 
and  the  fact  that  most  of  us  have  to 
look  into  a  book  to  see  just  what  the 
Missouri  Compromise  was  shows  a 
change  more  important  than  in  pop 
ulation.  And,  immediately  more  im 
portant  than  that,  it  was  in  the  same 
year  that  Irving' s  Sketch  Book  was 
published,  a  book  significant  in  the 
history  of  American  literature.  Liter 
ature  and  public  life, — Lowell's  energies 
were  to  express  themselves  chiefly  in 
these  two  directions,  or,  rather,  with 
him  the  two  directions  were  to  become 
almost  parallel.  So  it  will  be  a  good 
thing  for  us  to  get  an  idea,  or  to  revive 
our  recollection,  of  the  difference  between 
public  life  then  and  now  and  literature 
I  then  and  now. 

For  a  good  many  years  before  Sep 
tember  22,  1862,  no  public  man  could 
avoid  taking  a  definite  position  on  the 
subject  of  slavery.  He  might  not  take 


8  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 
a  reasonable  position,  but  some  position 
he  had  to  take.  As  we  look  back  to 
the  years  of  LowelPs  boyhood,  it  seems 
as  though  there  could  have  been  but  a 
single  course  obvious  and  even  obliga 
tory.  In  1820  was  the  Missouri  Com 
promise,  in  1830  Webster's  Eeply  to 
Hayne,  in  1831  the  Liberator  was  estab 
lished,  in  1832  was  passed  the  South 
Carolina  Nullification  Ordinance,  in  1837 
Lovejoy  was  murdered,  and  Austin  said 
that  he  had  died  like  a  fool.  Things 
like  these  forced  a  man  to  feel  that 
there  was  something  to  do  in  public 
life.  Now,  things  are  different  to-day. 
It  is  not  that  the  call  to  public  life 
comes  to  a  high-hearted  young  man 
with  less  authority  than  it  did,  but 
certainly  it  comes  with  less  immediate 
appeal  to  the  conscience.  The  poet  of 
to-day  rarely  feels  his  heart  stirred  on 
the  question  of  the  Tariff,  Civil  Service 
Eeform,  or  even  of  Municipal  Govern 
ment.  Not  that  there  is  nothing  in 


JAMES  RUSSELL  LOWELL  9 
our  current  political  life  which  ought  to 
arouse  the  sympathy :  there  is,  and  not 
the  less  that  its  call  is  less  readily  heard 
among  so  many  jarring  interests.  But 
there  is  nothing  that  stirs  the  heart  as 
did  slavery. 

Still,  it  cannot  be  affirmed  that  in  the 
two  decades  of  LowelPs  youth  the  pub 
lic  sentiment  of  Massachusetts  pushed 
everybody  in  the  right  direction  in  this 
matter.  Lowell  himself  did  not  see  the 
real  possibilities  of  public  affairs  in  his 
youthful  days.  He  was  neutral,  prob 
ably,  in  his  mind,  as  were,  doubtless, 
very  many  more  of  his  time, — neutral, 
partly  because  they  thought  other  mat 
ters  of  greater  importance,  and  partly 
because  they  felt  that  the  whole  matter 
was  better  hushed  up  and  kept  out  of 
public  attention,  like  a  cholera  scare 
that  may  be  bad  for  business. 

With  literature  the  case  was  different. 
It  is  not  remarkable  that,  to  the  young 
American  of  Lowell's  youth,  letters  pre- 


10  JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL 
sented  an  immense  attraction.  Lowell 
was  in  college  not  so  very  long  after 
Keats,  Coleridge,  and  Wordsworth,  had 
become  famous,  and  only  a  few  years 
after  the  first  volume  of  Tennyson. 
"  Great  voices  were  sounding  in  those 
days/'  says  Matthew  Arnold,  thinking 
of  his  own  days  at  Oxford.  With  Lowell 
we  should  rather  say  beautiful  echoes, 
perhaps,  or,  indeed,  not  so  much  echoes 
as  the  calls  of  those  who  had  gone  on 
before.  Especially  was  America  alert  to 
listen.  The  years  of  Lowell7  s  youth  were 
inspiring  years  for  a  young  man  who  felt 
the  sap  of  poetry  within  him.  His  ear 
lier  years  saw  these  publications, — The 
Sketch  Book,  The  Spy,  The  Ages,  Nature, 
Tamerlane  and  Other  Poems,  Twice  Told 
Tales,  Voices  of  the  Night, — in  other 
words,  the  first  works  of  Bryant,  Emer 
son,  Poe,  Hawthorne,  and  Longfellow, 
and,  with  some  exceptions,  the  first  sig 
nificant  work  of  Irving  and  Cooper. 
Think,  then,  of  the  stimulus  of  those 


JAMES  ETJSSELL  LOWELL  11 
years  to  a  young  man  who  loved  letters 
and  thought  by  letters  to  make  himself 
a  name.  Nowadays  everybody  writes, 
but  with  no  especial  idea  of  accom 
plishing  great  things  :  in  Lowell's  youth 
there  was  the  definite  opportunity  to 
have  a  hand  in  creating  a  literature  for 
one's  country. 

So  Lowell,  born  in  Cambridge  in  the 
first  quarter  of  the  century,  was  born  into 
a  very  different  world  from  that  which 
we  see  to-day,  and  one  which  was  far  more 
likely  to  give  free  play  to  the  generous 
activities  of  his  nature.  Commercialism 
and  Science  and  " Society''  were  all  in 
their  infancy,  and  Letters  and  Public 
Life  called  not  unpersuasively  to  the 
young  men  of  that  day  who  had  great 
possessions. 

James  Eussell  Lowell  was  certainly  one 
of  those  who  find  themselves  in  an  oppor 
tunity.  He  came  of  one  of  the  honored 
families  of  New  England,  his  father  being 
of  the  profession  which  had  for  two  hun- 


12  JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL 
dred  years  held  in  New  England  a  place 
of  peculiar  honor.  He  received  the  best 
education  of  his  time,  at  school  and  at 
Harvard  College  at  a  time  when  the  stu 
dent  at  Harvard  could  not  easily  miss  the 
especial  benefits  that  the  college  had  for 
him.  He  had  received  such  training  as 
the  best  society  of  a  cultivated  town  could 
give,  and  had  also  had  the  opportunity 
to  know  Nature  intimately  and  to  love 
her. 

On  the  day  of  his  graduation  from  Har 
vard  College,  when  he  was  nineteen  years 
old,  the  observer  sees  that  it  will  be  im 
possible  for  him  to  avoid  his  destiny  save 
by  direct  effort ;  for  he  has  sanctified 
himself  according  to  the  common  custom 
of  the  poets  by  setting  at  naught  the  pre 
scriptions  of  college  authority,  so  that 
his  Class  Poem  has  to  be  printed  while 
he  is  absent  in  rustication.  Shelley  and 
Landor,  in  like  manner,  could  not  bear 
the  rule  of  their  professors ;  and,  if  Byron 
and  Wordsworth  did  take  their  degrees 


JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL  13 
at  Cambridge,  they  did  not  come  out 
wranglers. 

On  graduating  from  college,  Lowell  pro 
ceeded  to  study  law.  He  received  Ms  de 
gree  from  the  Harvard  Law  School  in  1840, 
and  was  called  to  the  bar.  But  he  was 
about  as  much  of  a  lawyer  as  Walter  Scott 
in  his  earlier  days,  or  as  Macaulay,  to 
mention  one  or  two  who  had  preceded  him. 
He  did  his  reading  honestly  and  well,  de 
spite  certain  waverings  of  intention ;  and 
he  got  creditably  to  the  end  of  his  legal 
studies,  and  he  really  opened  an  office 
for  the  practice  of  law.  But  there  the 
matter  ended  except  for  its  after  influence. 
He  was  of  course  devoted  to  letters.  He 
knew  this,  had  always  known  it,  and 
never  in  the  bottom  of  his  heart  had  he 
had  the  intention  of  being  anything  but  a 
poet.  It  does  not  appear  that  he  wrote 
poems  at  a  very  early  age,  as  some  people 
do ;  but  as  soon  as  he  got  to  Harvard  Col 
lege  his  passion  had  a  chance.  ( '  Let  it  be 
remembered, "  says  another  student  of  the 


14  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 
same  time,  "that  the  whole  drift  of  fash 
ion,  occupation,  and  habit  among  the 
undergraduates  ran  in  lines  suggested  by 
literature. ?  ?  In  all  these  directions,  then, 
in  which  literature  led  the  college  student, 
Lowell  directed  his  energy.  He  wrote  the 
rhymed  minutes  of  the  Hasty  Pudding. 
He  was  one  of  the  founders  of  Alpha 
Delta  Phi,  then  at  Harvard  a  pre-emi 
nently  literary  society.  He  was  one  of  the 
editors  of  Harvardiana,  one  of  the  pio 
neers  of  college  journalism.  He  was  the 
recognized  poet  of  the  class  of  1838,  and 
wrote  the  Class  Poem.  When  he  gradu 
ated,  then,  he  had  already  made  a  begin 
ning,  as  so  many  other  poets  had  before  his 
time,  and  as  so  many  other  generous- 
hearted  boys  have  since,  elsewhere  as  in 
the  dear,  if  narrow,  confines  of  the  Yard. 
And  this  beginning  he  continued,  so 
that  in  the  next  few  years  he  had  already 
done  his  first  work  as  poet,  critic,  and 
editor.  In  1841  was  published  A  Year's 
Life,  his  first  volume  of  verse  ;  in  the  next 


JAMES  RUSSELL  LOWELL  15 
year  lie  wrote  for  the  Boston  Miscellany  his 
articles  on  the  Elizabethan  Dramatists ; 
and  in  1843,  with  his  friend  Carter,  he 
projected  and  edited  the  Pioneer  for  the 
three  months  of  its  noteworthy,  if  unpros- 
perous  career.  The  last  two  exercises 
we  may  pass  lightly,  but  of  the  poems  a 
word  or  two  must  be  said. 

Later  in  life  Lowell  looked  back  on 
these  poems  with  mixed  feelings.  In 
making  a  final  collection,  he  quoted  the 
remark  that  Landor  puts  into  the  mouth 
of  Petrarch,  — ' '  We  neither  of  us  are  such 
poets  as  we  thought  ourselves  when  we 
were  younger. "  He  would  gladly  have 
suppressed  many  which  are  still  reprint 
ed.  He  even  somewhere  says  of  himself  in 
college  days  that  he  was  "as  great  an  ass 
as  ever  brayed,  and  thought  it  singing. " 
But  all  this  must  be  taken  for  what  it  is 
worth.  Lowell  himself,  looking  back,  was 
probably  thinking  that  there  was  a  lack 
of  serious  aim.  In  middle  life  he  said  of 
Dryden,  "Perhaps  there  is  no  schooling 


16  JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL 
so  good  for  an  author  as  his  own  youthful 
indiscretions  " ;  and  about  the  same  time 
in  a  letter  he  writes,  "I  should  not  be  so 
indiscreet  now,  I  suppose  ;  and  yet  a  living 
verse  can  only  be  made  of  a  living  expe 
rience,  and  that  our  own. ' '  Certainly,  we 
need  not  think  these  great  poems.  None 
of  them  is  so  well  known  as  to  be  remem 
bered  except  because  it  is  by  him.  But, 
if  they  were  a  young  man's  poems,  born 
of  visionary  beauty  and  fancy,  they  had 
in  them  the  seed  of  something  more.  Co 
lumbus  listening  as  a  boy 

"to  hear 

The  tall  pine  forests  of  the  Apennines 
Murmur  their  hoary  legends  of  the  sea," 

and  watching 

"The  while  a  pair  of  herons  trailingly 
Flapped  inland," 

never  dreamed  of  what  afterward  came 
true.  Nor  did  Lowell  among  the  more 
homelike  trees  and  birds  of  Elmwood 


JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL  17 
clearly  see  what  work  was  in  store  for 
him,  when  his  hand  had  later  learned  its 
best  cunning  and  his  heart  been  stirred 
to  give  forth  its  truest  sympathy. 


II. 

In  the  town  in  which  I  live  there  is  a 
wall  on  one  side  of  the  canal  as  it  runs 
through  the  town,  considerably  below 
the  level  of  the  streets ;  and  in  that  wall 
there  is  a  door.  That  door  is  said  to  have 
led  to  one  of  the  stations  of  the  Under 
ground  Eailway.  I  always  look  at  it  as 
I  would  at  a  scene  in  a  theatre,  and  have 
never  tried  to  imagine  where  it  can  lead 
to.  Now  that  I  think  of  it,  I  suppose 
that  it  goes  into  somebody's  cellar.  I 
was  saying  how  natural  it  was  to  write 
of  Lowell  romantically.  To  us  of  the 
present  generation  the  anti-slavery  move 
ment  is  already  becoming  romance.  The 
Jubilee  Singers  were  not  so  far  wrong 
when  they  sang,— 

"Oh,  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin  is  a  mighty  fine 

book, 

And ?  twas  written  by  nobody  human : 
?Twas  written  long  ago,   by  Harriet 
Beecher  Stowe, 


JAMES   RUSSELL  LOWELL     19 

And  she  lived  upon  the  other  side  of 
Jordan. " 

Save  to  professed  students  of  history, 
the  Abolitionist  movement  is  by  this  time 
as  much  a  part  of  our  heroic  age  as  the 
battle  of  Bunker  Hill  or  the  landing  of 
the  Pilgrims.  In  this  movement  Lowell 
had  his  part. 

Originally,  he  had  not  meant  to  do  any 
thing  of  the  sort.  His  literary  work  in 
college,  and  his  work  after  college  for 
the  Boston  Miscellany  and  the  Pioneer, 
had  been  of  the  kind  that  one  would 
have  supposed.  The  Class  Poem  and  the 
work  on  the  Elizabethan  Dramatists  were 
in  accordance  with  the  proper  develop 
ment  of  a  young  man  of  letters.  Lowell 
had  at  this  time,  as  he  always  afterward 
had  at  odd  moments,  a  keen  feeling  of 
the  alluring  charm  of  the  life  with  nat 
ure  and  books  that  was  possible  to  him 
at  Elmwood.  He  was  passionately  fond 
of  the  place,  knew  all  the  trees  and  all 
the  birds,  and  was  perfectly  happy  in 


20  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 
every  season  of  the  year  with  the  good 
gifts  of  nature  ;  and  he  was  passionately 
fond  of  books  and  reading  of  all  sorts. 
The  life  of  a  poet  pure  and  simple, —  as 
of  Keats,  for  instance, —  a  life  devoted  to 
the  love  of  beauty  and  the  expression  of 
that  love,  was  more  than  possible, — was 
beckoning  to  him.  It  never  lost  its  pow 
er  entirely.  Once  seen  as  a  possibility,  it 
came  back  to  him  in  after  years  as  a  sort 
of  vision. 

It  is  true  that  in  no  case  would 
Lowell's  poetry  have  been  without  seri 
ous  aims  and  ideals.  There  was  too  much 
Emerson  and  Channing  in  the  air.  There 
was  too  much  Transcendentalism,  too, 
to  use  a  word  which,  as  he  afterward 
said,  was  then  "the  maid  of  all  work 
for  those  who  could  not  think."  He 
might  have  been  more  like  Shelley  than 
Keats. 

But  it  was  his  good  fortune  to  undergo 
a  real  experience.  It  was  through  Miss 
Maria  White  that  Lowell  first  perceived 


JAMES  KUSSELL  LOWELL  21 
the  claim  that  the  Anti-slavery  Move 
ment  made  upon  the  poets  of  his  time. 
You  may  see  that  it  did  make  a  claim 
upon  them  by  glancing  at  the  earlier 
poems  of  Whittier  or  Holmes.  It  was 
hard  to  escape  the  claim ;  although  Long 
fellow  at  first  was  quite  indifferent  to  it, 
and  Emerson  at  first  resisted  it,  thinking 
the  Abolition  Society  one  of  the  many 
societies  which  tended  to  devitalize  char 
acter.  Lowell  also,  at  first,  was  at  least 
indifferent.  In  his  Class  Poem  he  had 
even  exclaimed, — 

"O  Abolitionists,  both  men  and  maids, 
Who  leave  your  desks,  your  parlors, 

and  your  trades, 
To  wander  restless  through  the  land 

and  shout — 
But  few  of  you  could   tell   us  what 

about!" 

Considering,  however,  who  and  what  he 
was,  he  could  not  long  hold  aloof.  On 
December  26, 1844,  he  was  married  to  Miss 
White*  He  bad  been  for  some  years  en- 


22  JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL 
gaged  to  her.  He  had  already  felt  the 
enthusiasm  that  she  felt ;  he  had  already 
begun  to  see  that  here  was  something 
worth  being  a  poet  about.  Shortly  after 
his  marriage  he  began  to  write  for  the 
Pennsylvania  Freeman  and  the  Anti-slav 
ery  Standard,  and  continued  to  write  for 
them  regularly  for  some  years.  He  thus 
became  accustomed  to  expressing  himself 
on  the  great  and  living  question  of  the 
day,  and  in  scorn  of  the  very  lines  which 
have  just  been  quoted  found  himself 
writing :  — 

"  Behold  the  baby  arrows  of  that  wit 
Wherewith  I  dared  assail  the  wound- 
less  Truth ! 
Love   hath    refilled    the   quiver,    and 

with  it 

The  man  shall  win  atonement  for  the 
youth." 

For  slavery  was  a  living  question  dur 
ing  the  years  1844-50,  the  years  be 
tween  the  annexation  of  Texas  and  the 
Compromise  of  1850.  As  we  look  back 


JAMES  RUSSELL  LOWELL  23 
over  that  episode,  as  we  may  call  it,  in 
the  extension  of  the  United  States  to  the 
Pacific,  we  recollect  with  a  little  thrill  of 
surprise  that  in  its  day  it  was  a  matter 
very  different  from  what  we  vaguely  think 
it  to  have  been.  Whatever  the  necessi 
ties  of  history,  it  cannot  be  said  that  the 
Mexican  War  was  in  all  respects  a  war  to 
be  proud  of.  Considering  the  question  in 
a  state  of  nature,  without  conventional 
limitations,  —  as  of  governments,  treaties, 
political  parties,  intrigues,  and  what 
not, —  the  main  fact  would  seem  to  be 
that  here  was  a  splendid  country  between 
a  living  nation  and  one  not  so  living.  It 
would  of  necessity  be  settled  by  the  strong 
er,  more  virile  people.  All  this  Emerson 
saw  at  the  time.  The  thing  was  to  be,  and 
how  it  came  about  would  be  a  matter  of 
small  consequence  in  the  course  of  centu 
ries.  Lowell  saw  it,  too.  He  knew  that 
the  English  race  was  to  spread  over  the 
continent.  But  he  hated  to  see  the  thing 
done  hypocritically,  as  a  cloak  for  some- 


24  JAMES  RUSSELL  LOWELL 
thing  thoroughly  wrong,  as  a  matter  of 
mean  party  politics.  In  fact,  when  you 
add  to  the  natural  way  of  doing  things 
the  existing  governments  and  the  other 
matters  mentioned,  the  rights  and  wrongs 
become  rather  complicated.  Of  course  the 
actual  facts  are  pretty  plain.  The  Mexi 
can  War  was  put  through  on  a  Might- is- 
Eight  basis,  largely  for  the  development 
of  the  Slave  Power. 

All  this  was  rasping  in  the  highest 
degree  to  those  who  believed  from  the 
bottom  of  their  hearts  that  slavery  was  a 
killing  wrong,  and  of  these  enlightened 
few,  Lowell  was  now  one.  In  the  first 
place  they  felt  that  there  was  an  immense 
amount  of  wrong  in  the  Texas  matter 
and  in  the  Mexican  War.  But,  further 
and  worse,  this  wrong  was  not  done  to 
bring  about  any  good  end.  There  was 
for  the  moment  no  such  consolation. 
Bad  in  itself,  the  war  was  undertaken  to 
bring  about  something  worse.  Here  it 
was  that  Lowell  really  found  his  voice. 


JAMES  KUSSELL  LOWELL  25 
In  his  first  book  there  are  no  poems 
which  refer  in  any  definite  way  to  the 
question  of  slavery.  In  this  particular, 
Lowell  might  as  well,  almost,  have  been 
an  Englishman.  In  the  years  that  fol 
lowed,  his  poems  were  often  suggested 
by  his  anti-slavery  feeling.  But  in  most 
of  these  poems  we  see,  as  a  rule,  the  lover 
of  freedom,  if  we  can  make  the  distinc 
tion,  rather  than  the  hater  of  slavery. 
There  were  a  number  of  young  poets  of 
Freedom  about  1840,  and  in  this  respect 
Lowell  was  merely  cosmopolitan.  He 
was  very  ethereal,  as  if  he  had  no  desire 
to  deal  with  homely  matters  of  the  earth%  / 
Freedom,  liberty,  truth, — these  may  be 
the  enthusiasms  of  a  poet  of  any  time 
and  nation  ;  but  the  passion  of  America 
at  just  that  moment  was  anti-slavery. 
Whittier's  poems  have  each  some  blow 
|at  slavery :  Lowell  thought  rather  of 
freedom.  It  would  seem  that  the  slavery 
question  had  not  really  come  home  to 
him. 


26     JAMES  KUSSELL  LOWELL 

The  Mexican  War  brought  it  home. 
He  saw  the  recruiting  sergeants  enlist 
lads  in  Boston  to  fight  to  bring  more 
slave  States  into  the  Union.  He  heard 
the  politicians  seize  eagerly  upon  the 
campaign  cry,  "  Our  Country,  Eight  or 
Wrong  ! ? ;  He  heard  the  few  Massachu 
setts  men  in  Congress  who  did  venture 
to  take  an  independent  position  vilified 
and  condemned.  He  heard  the  Consti 
tution  seized  and  used  to  stamp  out  prin 
ciples  that  had  been  most  influential  in 
making  it  possible.  He  saw  Northern 
editors  ready  to  print  anything  and 
Northern  candidates  ready  to  promise 
anything  that  would  advance  their  par 
ties  or  themselves,  while  the  heroes  of 
the  war  made  political  capital  out  of  any 
thing  they  might  or  might  not  have  done. 
All  these  petty  meannesses  going  to  make 
up  a  great  wrong,  which  was  being  car 
ried  through  by  a  great  people  for  a  bad 
purpose, — such  was  the  stimulus  to  The 
Biglow  Papers.  When  we  think  how 


JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL  27 
Lowell  felt,  and  when  we  think  that  even 
in  ordinary  moments  he  wrote  easily  and 
well,  there  is  little  wonder  that  he  ac 
complished  a  masterpiece. 

How  much  the  inspiration  coming  from 
rage  at  public  events  had  to  do  with  the 
success  of  The  Biglow  Papers  seems  plain 
enough,  when  we  compare  it  with  A  Fable 
for  Critics  and  The  Legend  of  Sir  Launfalj 
which  appeared  the  same  year.  The 
Fable  is  carried  as  far  as  great  cleverness 
can  carry  it,  the  Legend  as  far  as  the 
most  excellent  intentions  can  inspire  a 
poetic  nature.  The  Fable,  when  we  know 
about  its  subject,  is  quite  as  amusing  as 
"  English  Bards  and  Scotch  Reviewers." 
The  Legend  is  quite  as  charming  as  ' '  Rob 
ert  of  Sicily."  But  The  Biglow  Papers 
is  a  masterpiece. 

When  Lowell  wrote, 

"  And  if  my  words  seem  treason  to  the 

dullard  and  the  tame, 
<Tis  but  my  Bay  State  dialect, — our 
fathers  spoke  the  same ! ? ' 


28  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 
lie  was  not  using  the  word  " dialect'7  in 
the  sense  which  The  Bigloiv  Papers  sug 
gest.  But  it  was  appropriate  that  this 
fierce  cry  of  scorn  from  the  North  should 
have  been  couched  in  the  uncouth  dialect 
of  New  England.  It  rang  true.  The 
A  Fable  for  Critics  was  in  a  literary  form, 
sanctioned  by  much  good  literary  author 
ity.  So  was  The  Legend  of  Sir  Launfal. 
For  The  Biglow  Papers  Lowell  had,  it  is 
true,  the  authority  of  Burns,  who  had 
always  been  a  favorite  of  his  5  but  he 
probably  cared  little  for  authority  of 
any  kind.  He  conceived  the  idea,  was 
pleased  at  it,  and  rushed  ahead. 

How  he  realized  the  whole  thing  in  his 
mind  is  shown  by  the  fulness  and  detail 
of  the  conception  as  it  gradually  came  in 
to  form.  It  would  have  been  something 
to  have  written  the  poems  of  Hosea  Big- 
low  ;  Lowell  added  the  figure  of  Parson 
Wilbur,  not  to  mention  Ezekiel  Biglow 
and  Birdofredum  Sawin.  If  Hosea 
breathes  the  spirit  of  the  Abolitionist, 


JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL  29 
certainly  Mr.  Wilbur  is  a  true  son  of  the 
Magnolia,  but  slightly  changed  to  ac 
commodate  himself  to  a  new  century. 

By  this  time  Lowell  had  done  more  than 
take  his  first  steps:  he  had  established 
himself.  It  is  true  that  he  was  not  as 
widely  known  now  as  afterward  ;  but,  ex 
cept  for  increasing  ripeness  of  character 
and  the  maturity  of  judgment  that  comes 
as  the  years  go,  he  was  now  what  he  after 
ward  became.  Even  when  professor  at 
Harvard,  he  was  no  more  of  a  student ; 
when  writing  for  the  North  American,  he 
was  no  more  a  critic ;  when  minister  to 
England,  he  was  not  more  truly  repre 
sentative  of  his  people  in  the  mother 
country.  He  often  felt  afterward  that 
he  was  never  in  his  life  more  of  a  poet, 
and  doubtless  the  many  who  know  him 
best  by  the  Legend  of  Sir  Launfal  will 
agree  with  him. 

During  these  years  he  lived  in  Cam 
bridge  in  the  old  place  he  could  never 
leave  for  long,  in  the  town  which  he  al- 


30  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 
ways  loved,  and  of  which  he  felt  as  proud 
as  Socrates  was  of  Athens  or  Dante  of 
Florence.  He  lived  very  simply,  though 
happily,  not  being  really  even  i '  well  off, ' ' 
but  still  having  enough  to  keep  a  maid, 
so  that  his  wife  did  not  have  to  make  too 
much  of  a  slave  of  herself.  This  pleased 
him ;  for  he  was  a  consistent  anti-slavery 
man,  and  even  girded  humorously  at  hav 
ing  to  allow  Ellen  to  bring  up  water  for 
his  bath,  and  had  to  circumvent  her  in 
order  to  bring  up  his  own  coal.  Some 
thing  more  than  anti-slavery  feeling  led 
him  to  assume  the  place  of  nursery  maid 
to  his  children,  when  he  could  get  a 
chance,  which  they  repaid  in  the  simple 
but  effective  currency  which  children 
never  lack.  It  may  also  be  noted  that 
he  kept  chickens,  and  increased  his  lore 
of  more  melodious  birds.  Yet  he  found 
time  not  only  for  much  reading,  but  for 
much  writing  for  the  North  American 
Review,  the  Broadway  Journal,  the  Mas 
sachusetts  Quarterly,  the  Anti-  slavery 


JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL    31 

Standard,  the  Pennsylvania  Freeman,  Put 
nam's  Magazine — how  curious  the  old 
names  look  now  !  —  poetry  by  prefer 
ence,  but  also  prose  as  well. 

Although  he  was  not  in  these  earlier 
years  a  very  popular  poet,  yet  he  had 
many  friends.  Of  these  friends,  fortu 
nately,  one  kept  a  diary.  Longfellow 
notes  a  walk  withClough  "  to  see  Lowell, 
whom  we  found  musing  before  his  fire  in 
his  study.  His  wife  came  in,  slender  and 
pale  as  a  lily. "  He  writes  of  a  supper 
which  Lowell  gives  to  Thackeray,  who  was 
then  lecturing  in  Boston.  With  Emerson 
he  dines  with  Lowell,  and  they  plan  a  new 
club  to  dine  together  once  a  month. 

It  was  a  happy  life,  and  a  good  one ;  but 
it  had  the  breaks  that  every  life  must  have 
at  one  time  or  another.  Of  four  children 
born  to  him,  only  one  lived  to  grow  up. 
' i  Death  is  a  private  tutor, ?  ?  he  wrote  after 
ward.  *  *  We  have  no  fellow-scholars,  and 
must  lay  our  lessons  to  heart  alone. " 
Doubtless  such  things  are  lessons,  nor  need 


32    JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 

we  take  it  upon  ourselves  to  feel  that  Low 
ell  had  too  many  of  them.  In  1853,  how 
ever,  came  something  more  than  a  lesson. 
His  wife  died.  She  had  long  been  deli 
cate,  and  had  been  often  ill,  but  had  ral 
lied  again  and  again.  But  now  she  died ; 
and  his  life,  he  felt,  was  broken  in  two. 
So  far  as  years  are  concerned,  he  had  cer 
tainly  come  to  near  the  half-way  point. 
And  perhaps  his  life  was  never  the  same 
again.  It  was  larger,  on  the  whole,  more 
brilliant,  more  useful,  and  fuller  of  the 
stuff  that  makes  men;  but  probably  it 
always  lacked  something.  He  sometimes 
felt  afterward  that  now  he  ceased  to  be  a 
poet.  At  such  times  he  could  hardly  have 
thought  of  the  breadth  of  meaning  in  the 
word,  even  as  he  had  already  defined  it 
himself. 


III. 

In  the  A  Fable  for  Critics  Lowell  had 
mentioned  himself.  ' '  There  is  Lowell, > J 
says  he,  "who  is  always  trying  to  be  a 
poet,  in  spite  of  his  invariable  moraliz 
ing,  7  7  or  something  like  that.  ' '  A  whole 
bale  of  isms,"  is  his  expression. 

It  would  be  hard  to  say  whether  Low 
ell  really  thought  this  an  incisive  char 
acterization  of  himself.  It  has  often 
been  thought  that  it  was  a  pity  for  a 
poet  to  be  too  much  of  a  reformer.  Mil 
ton,  for  instance, —  many  people  regret 
that  he  should  have  gone  hammer  and 
tongs  into  the  pamphlet  war  of  1641, 
and  wish  that  he  had  stayed  at  Horton, 
writing  lovely  poems.  Probably,  how 
ever,  he  could  never  have  written  Para 
dise  Lost  (as  it  now  stands),  had  he  not 
gone  into  the  stress  of  the  Animadversions 
and  the  Areopagitica,  the  Iconoclastes  and 
the  Second  Defence.  As  for  Lowell,  the 
most  vigorous  of  his  "  isms ??  was  Aboli- 


34  JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL 
tionism ;  and  we  have  seen  that  the  re 
sult  of  that  was  to  arouse  him  to  the 
production  of  the  best  thing  he  had  ever 
done.  Abolitionism  had  enabled  him  to 
do  what  he  had  always  longed  to  do, — 
make  a  real  contribution  to  literature. 

Still,  not  taking  these  lines  as  abso 
lutely  literal  self-criticism,  looking  at 
them  rather  as  the  expression  of  a  cer 
tain  consciousness  within  the  man  of 
what  he  really  was,  we  must  admit  a 
good  deal  of  truth.  Practically,  we  have 
here  the  expression  of  a  feeling  of  some 
thing  in  his  whole  make-up  that  was  not 
entirely  in  accord  with  the  poetic  im 
pulse.  Here  Lowell  was  certainly  right. 
There  was  something  in  his  nature  that 
did  not  harmonize  very  well  with  the  de 
sire  to  put  himself  wholly  into  his  poetry. 
That  something,  however,  was  not  the 
propagandist  disposition  (a  poet  may  be 
a  propagandist, — for  instance,  Shelley)  : 
it  was  the  disposition  of  the  scholar.  Nor 
was  Lowell  the  only  one  aware  of  this 


JAMES  KUSSELL  LOWELL  35 
characteristic  :  it  was  very  generally  rec 
ognized.  But,  then,  in  those  days  there 
was  little  distinction  in  the  general  mind 
between  letters  and  scholarship.  So  it 
did  not  seem  very  noteworthy.  Longfel 
low  was  a  scholar. 

As  for  Longfellow,  one  day  in  the  au 
tumn  of  1853,  after  some  hours  given  to 
college  work,  he  found  his  eyes  suffering, 
and  made,  as  he  had  made  before,  a  res 
olution  to  retire  from  his  professorship. 
In  the  spring  he  begins  his  lectures  on 
Dante  with  the  note,  "the  last  course  I 
shall  ever  deliver. "  On  the  19th  of 
April  he  writes,  "  At  11  o'clock  in  No. 
6  University  Hall  I  delivered  my  last 
lecture, — the  last  I  shall  ever  deliver 
here  or  any  where. "  But  his  resignation 
does  not  seem  to  have  been  formally 
acted  upon  until  the  autumn. 

There  were  at  once  a  number  of  per 
sons  " mentioned/'  as  the  term  is,  as  his 
successor,  all  of  them  friends  of  his, 
which  precluded  his  devoting  himself  to 


36     JAMES  KUSSELL  LOWELL 
any  particular  one.     During  the  fall  no 
choice  was  made. 

With  the  beginning  of  the  new  year 
Lowell  began  a  course  of  lectures  on 
English  Poets  in  the  Lowell  Institute, 
which  had  been  founded  several  years  be 
fore  by  his  kinsman,  John  Lowell.  The 
first  lecture  was  given  January  9,  and 
by  the  end  of  the  month  it  was  as  good 
as  settled  that  Lowell  was  to  be  Long 
fellow7  s  successor.  The  choice  was  recog 
nized  by  everybody  as  most  appropriate. 
It  is  true  that  the  chair  had  been  held  for 
twenty  years  by  Longfellow,  so  that  the 
fact  of  a  poet  becoming  a  professor  was 
not  in  any  way  a  surprise.  In  fact,  poets 
had  been  professors  before  (Gray,  for  in 
stance,  although  he  never  screwed  him 
self  up  to  professing  any  thing)  ;  and  they 
have  been  professors  since.  It  is  also  to 
be  remembered  that  a  professor  in  those 
days  was  not  precisely  what  he  generally 
is  now,  when  a  piece  of  parchment  is  apt 
to  be  thought  a  credential  more  effective 


JAMES  RUSSELL  LOWELL    37 

;than  many  bays  of  Apollo.  We  must  not 
think  of  the  scholarship  of  our  own  time, 
which  is  not  only  very  unpoetic,  but,  on 
the  whole,  much  opposed  to  poetry  :  let 
us  think  only  of  the  old-time  scholarship, 
that  acquaintance  with  the  classics  and 
other  polite  languages  which  was  sup 
posed  to  be  not  only  the  natural  desire 
of  every  poet  or  man  of  letters,  but  also 
his  most  necessary  possession.  Even  at 
that,  the  especial  power  which  made 
Lowell  really  a  good  professor  was  not  a 
power  which  helped  his  poetry. 

Some  time  before,  as  has  been  said, 
Lowell,  then  not  long  out  of  college,  had 
published  in  the  Boston  Miscellany  his 
articles  on  the  Old  English  Dramatists. 
It  was  thirteen  years  afterward  that 
he  delivered  his  course  on  English 
Poetry.  Neither  of  these  series  will  be 
found  among  his  collected  works.  The 
essays  on  the  Elizabethan  Dramatists 
which  he  did  republish  were  written  in 
the  last  years  of  his  life,  when  he  re- 


38  JAMES  KUSSELL  LOWELL 
turned  to  these  favorites  of  his  youth. 
The  matter  of  some  of  the  Lowell  lect 
ures  may  practically  be  found  in  his 
later  essays  on  Chaucer,  Spenser,  Milton, 
Pope,  Wordsworth.  Besides  the  lectures 
on  particular  poets,  there  were  some  more 
general  lectures  ;  but  these  he  never  put 
in  print  himself. 

These  lectures  show  reading  and  schol 
arship,  so  far  as  English  literature  was 
concerned  ;  but,  as  the  Smith  Professor 
ship  of  Belles-lettres  was  practically 
understood  at  that  day  to  be  a  professor 
ship  of  modern  languages,  it  was  natural 
that  Lowell  should  have  desired  to  brush 
up  his  German  and  Italian.  He  accord 
ingly  went  abroad  for  two  years,  and 
only  in  1856  did  he  assume  the  chair 
that  had  been  held  by  Ticknor  and 
Longfellow.  When  he  did  return,  he  as 
sumed  other  duties  as  well.  But,  before 
we  speak  of  the  Atlantic  Monthly  and  his 
career  as  editor  there  begun,  we  must 
say  a  word  or  two  more  on  Lowell's 


JAMES  KUSSELL  LOWELL  39 
scholarship.  If  he  had  not  been  a 
scholar,  he  would  not  have  become  a  pro- 

\  fessor  ;  and,  if  he  had  not  become  a  pro 
fessor,  as  he  was  apt  to  think  himself,  he 
would  have  been  a  greater  poet.  "I 
believe  the  present  generation  doesn't 

i  think  I  was  made  for  a  poet,"  he  wrote 
at  a  later  time  to  Mr.  Ho  wells;  "but  I 

i  think  I  could  have  gone  near  convincing 
?  em  if  I  had  not  estranged  the  muse  by 
donning  a  professor's  gown."  This, 

!  then,   was  an  important  point    in    his 

Ilife. 

Lowell  is  less  remembered  as  a  scholar 
than  as  an  essayist,  a  poet,  a  critic,  or,  as 
what  we  may  call  for  want  of  a  better 

j  name,  a  man  of  letters.  So  far  as  con 
cerns  those  best  qualified  to  remember 
(namely,  other  scholars),  he  is  as  a  schol 
ar  best  remembered  for  the  spirit,  the  im- 

l  pulse,  the  encouragement,  which  he  gave 
scholarship  rather  than  for  any  partic 
ular  work.  You  will  find  little  reference 
to  learned  works  of  his  on  Shakspere  or 


40  JAMES  KUSSELL  LOWELL 
Chaucer.  In  fact,  lie  wrote  no  learned 
works.  " Produce  the  books,"  is  the 
demand  on  any  one  who  would  have  it 
that  one  or  another  is  a  scholar.  Lowell 
wrote  no  treatises  ;  and,  so  far  as  current 
scholarship  is  concerned,  he  is  pretty 
much  as  though  he  had  never  been. 
For  this  there  are  several  reasons.  In  the 
first  place,  scholarship,  in  the  particu 
lar  line  in  which  he  was  undoubtedly 
learned,  is  a  very  different  thing  from 
what  it  was  forty  years  ago.  The  very 
fact  that  Lowell,  when  he  went  abroad 
before  assuming  his  professorship,  spent 
a  winter  in  Dresden,  studying  German,  is 
almost  enough  in  itself  without  any  fur 
ther  comment.  In  his  day  men  went  to 
Germany  —  to  Dresden,  if  they  chose — to 
study  German  :  in  ours  they  go  there  to 
study  French  and  English.  Of  the  kind 
of  learning  of  which  our  professors  of 
modern  languages  have  accumulated 
much,  Lowell  had  little :  nor  need  we 
pause  even  to  think  why. 


JAMES  KUSSELL  LOWELL  41 
Lowell's  scholarship  was  not  the  schol 
arship  of  to-day.  He  had  but  a  dim 
conception  of  language  as  it  exists  at 
the  universities  to-day  ;  or  of  literature, 
either,  I  had  almost  added.  His  ideas 
on  language  were,  on  the  whole,  such  as 
he  gained  by  reading  the  literature  of 
any  language  in  question  for  the  moment. 
Further  he  had  no  especial  care  to  go, 
so  far  as  I  can  find  out.  As  for  the  lin 
guistic  studies  of  his  contemporary, 
Whitney,  I  presume  that  he  regarded 
them  as  having  especial  connection  with 
Sanskrit  or  Zend. 

There  is  much  to  be  said  in  favor  of 
scholarship  of  Lowell's  type,  even  so  far 
as  language  only  is  concerned.  When  a 
man  learns  a  language  from  its  poets  and 
its  great  prose  writers,  he  knows  it  in  a 
manner  very  different  from  that  which 
i  comes  chiefly  from  a  study  of  grammars 
and  dictionaries  and  treatises.  He  has  a 
more  real  appreciation  of  it.  He  misses 
a  possible  doctrinaire  character :  he  is 


42    JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 

more  apt  to  see  things  in  right  relation. 
Now  Lowell  had  learned  English  and  Old 
French  chiefly  by  reading  English  and 
Old  French.  He  used  to  read  and  mark 
his  books  constantly,  and  the  scattered 
notes  he  sometimes  went  over  and  in 
dexed.  Learning  of  this  sort,  learning 
based  upon  one's  own  marks  and  indexes, 
is  something  very  different  from  a  learn 
ing  based  on  the  marks  and  indexes  that 
another  man  has  made.  Now  that  we 
have  so  many  texts  well  edited  and  so 
many  monographs,  any  recent  graduate 
can  have  certainly  a  much  broader  range 
of  scholarship  than  was  possible  to  Low 
ell  ;  but  the  temptation  is  very  strong  to 
be  content  with  a  scholarship  that  stands 
lightly  on  the  texts,  as  one  might  say, 
and  is  not  rooted  in  them,  even  if  it  does 
not  now  and  then  go  so  far  as  to  leave 
texts  altogether  for  a  flight  upward  into 
the  regions  of  phonology  and  analogy. 
Lowell  had  the  simple  scholarship  that 
is  satisfied  with  knowing  languages  so  as 


JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL    43 

to  be  able  to  feel  their  genius  and  with 
-knowing  literatures  so  as  to  be  able  to 
luse  them  in  thinking.  As  to  sound  laws 
Sand  analogical  formations,  inquiries 
[about  sources  and  influences,  I  find  no 
s  allusion  to  these  matters  in  his  works, 
land  do  not  believe  that  they  found  any 
[place  in  his  lectures.  His  scholarship 
[was  of  the  old-time  sort  that  came  in 
j  with  Petrarch.  We  might  say  of  him 
iwhat  he  said  of  Longfellow:  "Mr. 
Longfellow  is  not  a  scholar  in  the  Ger 
man  sense  of  the  word, — that  is  to  say, 
he  is  no  pedant, — but  he  certainly  is  a 
scholar  in  another  and  perhaps  a  higher 
sense :  I  mean  in  range  of  acquirement 
( and  the  flavor  that  comes  from  it. ?  ?  This 
is  a  little  hard  on  German  scholarship, 
but  just  here  we  may  let  that  pass. 

But  how,  one  may  ask,  if  LowelPs 
|  scholarship  was  the  scholarship  of  Pe 
trarch  and  Poliziano,  of  Ben  Jonson  and 
Milton,  of  Pope  and  Johnson,  how  is  it 
that  it  was  a  bar  to  his  poetical  temper  ? 


44  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 
Any  one  will  understand  why  a  modern 
scholar,  a  scientist,  a  discoverer  of  laws 
and  of  sources,  should  not  at  the  same 
time  be  a  poet.  There  is  a  very  distinct 
opposition  in  the  two  modes  of  thought. 
One  is  bound  to  discover  what  actually 
has  been  and  to  conform  his  thinking  to 
it;  and  the  other  allows  his  thinking 
to  take  care  of  itself,  or,  rather,  he  trusts 
to  his  own  springs  of  feeling,  and  brings 
to  pass  things  that  conform  to  it.  That  is 
a  considerable  difference  :  the  man  who 
is  good  at  one  is  not  likely  to  be  good  at 
the  other.  Well,  Lowell  was  certainly  not 
a  thorough- paced  scientific  scholar  (if  he 
had  been,  he  would  probably  have  written 
no  poems  at  all)  ;  but  he  had  enough  of 
the  passion  for  seeing  how  things  actually 
were,  to  stand  at  times  in  the  way  of  his 
realizing  things  as  he  imagined  them. 
This  is  the  way  I  explain  the  fact  that 
he  was  often  out  of  poetic  trim,  that  he 
could  only  write  when  he  felt  like  it. 
He  had  two  natures,  the  critical  and  the 


JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL  45 
creative,  it  is  rather  the  fashion  to  call 
them  ;  and  they  seem  to  have  existed  in 
pretty  nearly  equal  degree,  though  not 
by  any  means  in  equal  balance.  When 
I  say  "  critical,"  I  do  not  mean  that 
Lowell  was  necessarily  what  we  should 
call  a  great  critic.  I  mean  that  he  had 
that  faculty  of  mind  that  is  not  only  con 
tent,  but  especially  desires,  to  consider 
the  work  of  other  men  and  see  what  it 
is.  A  man  in  whom  this  spirit  is  pre 
dominant  rarely  creates  much  himself, 
in  the  common  understanding  of  the 
word;  and,  wherever  the  disposition  is 
strong,  it  is  apt  to  interfere  with  the 
writing  of  poetry. 

In  another,  a  minor  way,  does  the  dif 
ference  show.  A  scholar  must  be  dili 
gent.  Lowell  sometimes  was  :  he  worked 
hard  in  Dresden  to  learn  German  as  he 
wanted  to  know  it ;  he  worked  at  other 
times,  too,  once  ten  hours  a  day  for  two 
months,  making  verbal  indexes  for  Mid 
dle  English  poems ;  and  he  must  have 


46    JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 

done  many  more  things  of  the  same  sort. 
His  friends  tell  me  that  he  was  indolent 
of  disposition,  but  a  scholar  who  knows 
as  much  as  Lowell  did  cannot  have  been 
indolent  all  the  time.  You  cannot  learn 
languages  by  inspiration.  On  the  other 
hand,  you  can  write  poetry  in  that  way  ; 
and  Lowell  generally  did.  "Sir  Laun- 
fal "  is  said  to  have  been  written  in  two 
days  and  nights,  and  the  "Commemo 
ration  Ode"  in  about  the  same  time. 
"The  Cathedral"  he  wrote  and  then 
rewrote,  but  finally  came  back  to  the 
first  draught.  Even  the  "Class  Poem" 
was  done  under  the  stress  of  time. 
When  he  got  thoroughly  aroused,  then 
he  could  write,  and  preferably  poetry. 
It  is  true  that  for  all  this  a  great  deal  of 
preparation  was  necessary.  "  My  brain 
requires  a  long  brooding  time,"  said  he, 
"ere  it  can  hatch  anything.  As  soon 
as  the  life  comes  into  the  thing,  it  is 
quick  enough  in  chipping  the  shell." 
Or,  to  reverse  the  figure,  you  can  make 


JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL  47 
a  coal  glow  very  soon ;  but  it  has  taken 
a  good  while  to  make  the  coal.  This 
temper,  not  the  white  heat  necessarily, 
but  the  general  mood,  he  felt  sure  was 
his  real  temper.  Certainly,  it  may  have 
been.  Our  concern  here  is  that  it  was 
not  his  only  temper. 

Of  another  critic  he  writes  :  "I  find, 
somewhat  to  my  surprise,  from  his  let 
ters,  that  he  had  the  imaginative  temper 
in  all  its  force.  Can't  work  for  months 
together  :  if  he  tries,  his  forehead  drips 
with  Angstschweiss ;  feels  ill  and  looks 
well, —  in  short,  is  as  pure  a  hypochon 
driac  as  the  best.  This  has  had  a  kind 
of  unhealthy  interest  for  me,  for  I  never 
read  my  own  symptoms  so  well  described 
before." 

One  is  rather  too  apt  to  catch  the  idea 
from  Lowell's  own  writings  or  from  his 
friends  that  at  bottom  he  disliked  be 
ing  a  professor  and  wished  to  be  always 
a  poet.  This  cannot  have  been  the  case. 
Doubtless,  Lowell  disliked  the  work  nee- 


48  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 
essary  to  get  his  materials  into  regu 
lar,  scholarly  shape ;  he  disliked  the 
labor  of  writing  lectures  and  the  ordeal 
of  delivering  them ;  he  disliked  the 
bother  and  confinement  of  college  order. 
But  he  was  passionately  fond  of  the  study 
of  language,  or,  more  exactly,  of  words 
not  as  fossil  poetry,  to  use  Emerson's 
phrase,  but  as  words.  Speaking  of  Per- 
civaPs  linguistic  tastes,  he  says,  "  Who 
ever  has  been  bitten  by  that  gadfly 
knows  that  there  is  scarce  a  monomania 
so  utterly  absorbing."  No  one  will  pre 
tend  that  Lowell's  linguistic  studies  were 
not  absolutely  whole-hearted.  Mr.  Les 
lie  Stephen,  in  1863,  found  him  at  first 
"  a  singularly  complete  specimen  of  the 
literary  recluse,"  sitting  among  books, 
whose  ragged  and  thumbed  appearance 
and  well-pencilled  margins  showed  how 
constantly  he  had  used  them. 

If  he  had  not  loved  his  work  devot 
edly,  Lowell  would  never  have  accom 
plished  as  much  as  he  did.  And,  wheth- 


JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL  49 
er  lie  were  more  truly  a  scholar  or  a  poet, 
we  must  not  close  this  section  without  a 
word  upon  the  soundest  bit  of  linguistic 
scholarship  which  he  ever  put  forth. 
You  will  not  find  it  in  his  published 
essays :  there  is  nothing  there  so  im 
portant  from  a  linguistic  point  of  view. 
It  is  in  an  unlikely  place;  i.e.,  pre 
fixed  to  the  second  series  of  The  Biglow 
Papers. 

This  paper  is  scholarly  because  it 
shows  the  genius  of  the  scholar.  It  says 
things  that  have  not  gained  currency  in 
America  even  now.  It  shows  an  intui 
tive  knowledge  of  some  of  the  funda 
mental  positions  on  which  the  science  of 
language  is  based.  It  is  true  that  it 
shows  much  else  not  so  valuable.  But 
when  Lowell  saw  that  the  spoken  word 
is  the  basis,  not  the  written,  that  exact 
chronology  must  be  regarded  in  tracing 
etymologies,  that  by  comparing  later 
forms  you  can  infer  earlier  ones,  he  had 
found  out  the  very  things  that  were 


50     JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 

needed  to  make  him  one  of  the  great 
linguists  of  the  day.  Unfortunately  for 
his  brother  scholars,  he  was  not  aware  of 
this  fact. 


IV. 

IN  the  town  of  Goettingen  there  are 
tablets  placed  upon  the  houses  where 
George  Ticknor  lived,  and  Edward  Ev 
erett,  George  Bancroft,  and  John  Lothrop 
Motley.  But  the  American  visitor  will 
find  no  tablet  over  the  door  of  Kleine 
Schiessgasse,  4,  Dresden.  To  tell  the 
truth,  Lowell  was  never  very  much  of  a 
German  student,  and  never  cared  much 
for  German  student  life  :  in  fact,  so  far 
as  I  know,  he  never  saw  anything  of  it. 
He  was  rather  old  for  it  at  the  time, — 
he  was  thirty-seven  ;  and  he  was  past 
boyish  enthusiasms,  as  for  duelling  and 
drinking,  and  anxious  to  get  from  Ger 
many  what  he  wanted  (namely,  a  knowl 
edge  of  the  language  and  literature)  as 
soon  as  possible.  It  was  rather  a  grind 
for  him  in  Dresden  than  otherwise. 
In  fact,  he  says  it  was  one  of  the  most 
miserable  winters  that  he  ever  passed. 
The  reason  is  not  very  far  to  seek  :  he 


52  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 
had  to  talk  German.  Now,  for  a  man 
who  is  so  easy  and  natural  and  predes 
tined  a  talker  as  Lowell  was,  it  is  a  ter 
rible  thing  to  be  able  to  talk  nothing  but 
a  language  that  you  cannot  quite  man 
age.  At  first  it  condemns  you  to  com 
monplace.  Afterward  it  deprives  your 
remarks  of  the  true  outline  and  charac 
ter.  Anyway,  it  makes  an  effort  of  a 
natural  necessity. 

But,  if  Lowell  did  not  like  Dresden 
much,  he  did,  at  least,  learn  German ; 
and  that  was  what  he  had  come  for.  It 
would  not  seem,  however,  that  he  ever 
really  cared  much  for  the  language  or 
the  literature.  In  one  of  his  letters  of 
this  time  he  says  that  the  history  of  the 
German  literature  is  most  interesting, 
and  that  it  makes  many  things  in  Eng 
lish  literature  clearer  to  him.  Lowell 
was  not  the  man  to  go  through  such  a 
winter  as  a  mere  grind.  At  the  time  he 
may  have  thought  that  he  got  something 
out  of  German  literature.  But,  really, 


JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL  53 
j  could  have  made  no  great  impression 
n  him.  It  is  true  that  some  years  after- 
d  he  read  the  correspondence  of  Less- 
ig  and  wrote  an  article  on  the  subject, 
ut  German  literature  never  had  any 
reat  place  in  his  mind.  You  can  hard- 

find  an  allusion  to  German  literature 
r  any  mention  of  it  in  all  his  essays,  so 
Lch  in  allusions  to  English  and  French. 

remember  half  a  dozen  references  to 
roethe  and  one  or  two  to  Heine  ;  but 
therwise,  however  much  German  liter- 
ture  illuminated  English  in  Lowell's 
lind,  its  light  was  by  no  means  reflected 
o  his  readers. 

In  the  summer  of  1856  Lowell  came 
ome,  and,  the  house  at  Elmwood  being 
bill  leased,  took  up  his  abode  in  what 
ras  called  "  Professors'  Bow."  For  the 
aoment  he  was  plunged  into  preparation 
or  college  work.  He  had  to  select  in- 
tructors  for  the  practical  teaching  of 
lie  modern  languages  (there  were  four 
of  them,  for  French,  German,  Italian, 


54  JAMES  RUSSELL  LOWELL 
and  Spanish,  respectively);  and  he  had 
to  prepare  his  own  lectures,  which  were 
on  the  literatures.  The  first  duty  he 
managed  in  spite  of  the  immigrations  of 
Teutons,  Swiss,  Hungarians,  and  Poles, 
who  were  "all  desirous  [especially  the 
last  three]  to  teach  the  German  lan 
guage  at  Cambridge.77  The  second  he 
accomplished  by  revising  his  Lowell 
lectures  and  preparing  courses  on  Dante 
and  German  Literature. 

College  society  at  that  time  was  agree 
able.  We  get  rather  more  of  an  idea  o1 
it  from  Longfellow's  diary  than  from 
Lowell's  letters,  probably  because  it  is  a 
diary,  for  one  thing,  and  perhaps,  also, 
because  Lowell  kept  a  little  more  to 
himself,  for  another.  For  in  a  year  01 
two  Lowell  moved  back  to  Elmwood 
and,  not  being  very  enterprising  in  mi 
nor  matters,  he  used  to  stay  there  a  gooc 
deal.  One  more  reason  there  was,  how 
ever :  he  had  now  very  little  time  t( 
give  his  friends.  He  had  not  been  ai 


JAMES  RUSSELL  LOWELL  55 
home  very  long  before  lie  assumed  the 
editorship  of  a  new  periodical  to  be 
founded, —  namely,  the  Atlantic  Monthly, 
—  of  which  the  first  number  was  issued 
in  November,  1857. 

The  reader  who  wishes  to  get  the  right 
idea  of  this  important  element  in  Low- 
elFs  life  must  for  the  moment  forget 
the  present  stately  and  Bostonian  isola 
tion  of  the  Atlantic  among  the  more 
popular  and  beautifully  illustrated  maga 
zines.  The  Atlantic  Monthly,  as  then  pro 
jected,  was  not  eccentric  among  (Ameri 
can)  magazines.  It  was  conceived  on 
lines  that  had  already  obtained  very 
generally,  only  put  up  perhaps  a  little 
higher.  It  was  (as  it  is)  literary,  the 
difference  being  that  in  those  days  mag 
azines  were  supposed  to  be  literary. 
What  would  be  the  success  of  a  maga 
zine  at  the  present  day  which  was  ed 
ited  by  a  college  professor  and  had  for 
star  contributors  only  the  greatest  poet, 
the  chief  philosopher,  and  the  wittiest 


56  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 
observer  in  the  country,  might  be  a 
problem,  unless  it  were  meant  to  ap 
peal  to  a  very  limited  constituency. 
But  in  Lowell's  day  illustrations  were 
in  their  infancy,  and  journalism  confined 
itself  largely  to  the  journals,  so  that  a 
magazine  edited  by  Lowell  with  the  help 
of  Longfellow,  Emerson,  and  Holmes,  had 
rather  a  better  chance  than  it  would  to 
day. 

It  is  curious  to  look  over  the  first  vol 
umes —  Lowell  edited  seven — and  see 
what  is  there.  Everything  is  anony 
mous  ;  and  it  gives  one  a  little  thrill, 
therefore,  to  see  on  the  same  page  in  the 
first  number  the  mystic  "If  the  red 
slayer  thinks  he  slays, "  followed  by 
"The  Autocrat  of  the  Breakfast  Table  : 
Every  Man  his  ownBoswell,"  appearing 
as  calmly  as  if  wholly  ignorant  that  they 
were  to  be  classics.  One  may  also  won 
der  what  the  readers  of  the  first  number 
thought  of  "  Brahma  "  :  they  were  prob 
ably  better  attuned  to  it  than  we  are. 


JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL  57 
In  the  second  number  you  may  see  on 
successive  pages  " Floyd  Ireson's  Bide" 
and  "  Society  and  Solitude, "  and  a  little 
later  the  essay  on  the  t(  Library  of  Old 
Authors ' J  following  ' i  Sandalphon. ' ' 
Mot  that  the  whole  of  the  Atlantic  was 
made  up  of  such  matters.  A  good  deal 
of  it  is  not  so  very  interesting.  But,  out 
of  over  a  hundred  articles  in  the  first 
volume,  one  may  count  probably  more 
than  a  score  that  everybody  remembers 
after  forty  years,  which  seems  a  large 
percentage. 

Of  Lowell's  own  articles  in  these  first 
numbers  there  will  be  a  word  to  say 
later.  They  were  not  the  star  articles, 
as  his  used  to  be  later  in  the  North  Ameri 
can  Review.  I  suppose  this  was  because 
he  had  to  do  much  of  the  editor's  work 
himself,  and  found  that  together  with  his 
college  work  it  took  up  all  his  time.  In 
his  letters  you  may  find  a  good  many 
snatches  which  give  a  good  idea  of  his 
trials.  I  like  best  this  one,  written  to 


58  JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL 
Mr.  James  T.  Fields  after  he  had  given 
up  his  position.  u  You  asked  the  other 
day  for  an  article  on  'Birds7  Nests.'  I 
don't  find  it,  and  think  it  must  have  been 
made  into  soup  for  a  blue- buttoned  Man 
darin  that  dropped  in  to  dinner.  What 
could  I  do  ?  Eats  were  not  to  be  had  on 
such  short  notice.  That  is  my  theory. 
Practically,  it  may  turn  up  some  day, 
like  Mr.  Brown's  Genius, — when  I  had 
given  up  all  hopes  of  ever  seeing  it 
again."  It  was  certainly  hard  enough 
to  find  good  articles  and  see  that  they 
were  rightly  printed.  Too  much  was  it, 
we  shall  agree  with  Lowell,  to  remem 
ber  what  had  happened  to  the  other 
ones. 

One  may  imagine  vaguely  that  the 
duty  of  the  editor  of  the  Atlantic  in 
those  days  was  merely  to  go  around  once 
a  month  and  get  poems  and  articles  from 
Longfellow  and  the  other  famous  authors 
and  household  favorites,  and  print  them. 
This  would  be  a  mistaken  notion.  To 


JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL  59 
tell  the  truth,  Longfellow  was  not  at 
first  very  enthusiastic  ;  and  to  the  two- 
score  numbers  edited  by  Lowell  he  con 
tributed  only  about  a  dozen  poems,  and 
those  mostly  to  the  first  volume.  Emer 
son  also  sent  several  things  to  the  first 
volume,  but  very  few  after  that  ;  and  the 
same  thing  may  be  said  of  Whittier. 
As  for  Motley  and  Cabot,  who  had  been 
at  the  foundation  dinner,  they  wrote 
each  two  articles  in  Lowell's  day.  "Now 
there  had  to  be  in  those  seven  volumes 
about  a  thousand  articles,  less  rather 
than  more.  Of  this  thousand  Lowell 
himself  wrote  a  good  many,  the  majority 
being  reviews  of  books,  though  some  of 
these  were  practically  articles,  and  were 
republished  in  his  essays.  And,  of 
course,  his  right-hand  man  was  Holmes. 
He  had  himself  said  on  starting  that 
Dr.  Holmes  was  to  be  the  main  stay,  and 
he  certainly  was.  The  Autocrat  made  a 
great  hit,  and  was  followed  by  the  Pro 
fessor,  and  that  by  Elsie  Venner  under 


60  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 
the  name  of  The  Professor's  Story.  Next 
as  a  reliance  came  probably  Mr.  Charles 
Eliot  Norton  :  at  any  rate,  he  did  a  good 
deal  of  work.  And  Lowell  soon  found 
that  Thomas  Wentworth  Higginson  (not 
yet  Colonel)  was  a  stalwart  helper. 
These  four,  I  suppose,  must  have  written 
about  a  third  of  the  Atlantic,  between 
them,  during  the  years  of  Lowell's  edi 
torship.  With  such  a  reliance  an  editor, 
though  of  a  new  venture,  could  sleep 
easily  of  nights,  even  if  he  did  get  but 
a  poem  or  so  now  and  then  from  Long 
fellow,  Whittier,  Emerson,  and  himself. 
Besides  these,  however,  there  were 
many  others  whose  names  are  now  very 
familiar.  From  New  York  were  Bayard 
Taylor  and  Parke  Godwin,  who  wrote 
the  first  political  articles.  Some  younger 
men  appeared  in  time,  as  Fitz-James 
O'Brien  and  Theodore  Winthrop.  Most 
noteworthy  as  a  group  were  certain  New 
Englanders :  not  only  the  most  famous 
of  all  New  England  authors,  Harriet 


JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL  61 
Beecher  Stowe,  who  had  been  reckoned 
npon  from  the  start,  for,  as  time  went  on, 
editorial  sagacity  recognized  Eose  Terry, 
Harriet  Prescott,  the  "  wonderful  young 
girl"  who  wrote  The  Amber  Gods,  and 
Elizabeth  Stuart  Phelps.  Anonymously, 
I  may  also  mention  the  authors  of  The 
Queen  of  the  Bed  Chessman  and  of  My 
Double,  and  How  He  Undid  Me. 

But,  of  all  the  articles  in  the  Atlantic  in 
those  days,  none  has  a  more  curious  in 
terest  for  me  than  certain  poems  that  be 
gan  to  appear  in  the  fifth  volume.  You 
may  know  them  by  the  mottoes  from 
Heine,  or,  if  there  be  no  mottoes,  you 
may  know  them  by  keeping  Heine  in 
mind.  They  came  from  what  was  then  the 
West, —  namely,  Columbus, — and  were 
in  due  time  followed  by  their  author,  who 
wished  to  make  the  acquaintance  of  the 
New  England  literati.  Lowell  received 
him  cordially,  and  made  a  little  dinner 
for  him  at  Parker's,  the  table  being  made 
up  of  Mr.  Fields  and  Dr.  Holmes.  The 


62  JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL 
latter  seems  to  have  been  the  only  one 
who  divined  the  true  significance  of  the 
occasion.  "Well,  James, "  said  he, 
"this  is  something  like  the  apostolic  suc 
cession  :  this  is  the  laying  on  of  hands." 
Probably  no  one  of  the  four  thought  at 
the  time  that,  as  Lowell  himself  had  suc 
ceeded  to  the  primacy  in  letters  held  by 
Irving,  so  he  was  to  pass  on  the  respon 
sibility  to  William  Dean  Howells. 


V. 

WE  sometimes  hear  the  expression 
"  pure  literature  "  used,  meaning  litera 
ture  that  is  without  contamination  from 
politics  or  religion  or  such  things. 
This,  on  the  whole,  was  not  precisely 
LowelPs  idea  of  literature.  Indeed,  his 
best  literary  work  so  far  had  had  its  con 
nection  with  public  events.  Nor  had 
the  Atlantic  been  founded  merely  for 
"pure  literature "  :  it  was  (as  it  is)  a 
"Magazine  devoted  to  Literature,  Art, 
and  Politics. "  "Science"  was  intro 
duced  in  time.  In  those  days  politics 
were  very  interesting  —  at  least,  they  were 
about  the  time  of  the  founding  of  the 
Atlantic;  and  they  were  also  three  and 
four  years  later.  Mr.  Francis  H.  Under 
wood,  who  ought  to  know, — for  he  was 
actively  concerned  in  founding  the  At- 
lantiCy — says  that  "one  purpose  of  the 
magazine  was  to  give  the  active  sup 
port  of  letters  to  the  anti-slavery  cause." 


64     JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 

Doubtless  this  was  so.  A  magazine  in 
which  Lowell  and  Whittier  and  Mrs. 
Stowe  wrote  (not  to  mention  others) 
would  certainly  have  given  literary  sup 
port,  even  if  indirectly,  to  the  anti-sla 
very  cause.  But  at  the  beginning  the 
Atlantic  was  to  be  directly  political ;  and 
in  the  first  volume  will  be  found  several 
articles  on  political  subjects,  written,  as 
has  been  said,  by  Mr.  Parke  Godwin, 
who  had  been  for  some  time  a  writer  for 
the  New  York  Evening  Post. 

I  cannot  say  just  what  was  the  im 
pression  of  these  articles.  Mr.  Godwin 
wrote  only  for  the  first  six  numbers.  In 
the  number  for  August,  1858,  appeared 
an  article  in  a  somewhat  different  style, 
entitled  "The  Pocket  Celebration  of  the 
Fourth.7'  Unsigned,  according  to  cus 
tom,  it  was  probably  at  once  recog 
nized  as  being  by  Lowell.  It  was  cer 
tainly  an  excellent  exhibition  of  Lowell's 
true  manner  in  prose.  He  had  always 
said,  and  doubtless  with  perfect  truth, 


JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL  65 
that  prose  (his  best  prose,  he  meant) 
was  really  harder  for  him  to  write  than 
poetry.  But  this  article  he  must  have 
written  with  a  very  flowing  pen.  It  was 
a  sharp  criticism  of  a  speech  by  Eufus 
Choate  :  it  may  still  be  read  with  great 
amusement,  even  though  we  have  almost 
forgotten  what  it  is  all  about.  And  it  is 
not  merely  an  attack  :  Lowell  really  ap 
preciated  much  that  was  fine  in  Eufus 
Choate,  and  what  he  has  to  say  on  this 
side  is  as  good  as  what  he  has  to  say  on 
the  other.  The  article  took,  not  wholly 
to  LowelFs  pleasure.  "  These  personal 
things  are  not  such  as  I  should  choose  to 
do,"  he  wrote  in  a  letter,  "  for  they  sub 
ject  me  to  all  manner  of  vituperation ; 
but  one  must  take  what  immediate  texts 
the  newspapers  afford  him,  and  I  ac 
cepted  the  responsibility  in  accepting  my 
post.'7  On  another  text  afforded  him 
by  current  events  he  wrote  shortly  after 
ward  another  article,  this  time  on  Caleb 
Cushing  ("Gineral  C."  of  The  Biglow 


66     JAMES  KUSSELL  LOWELL 
Papers),  not  so  good,  lie  thought  himself, 
and  probably  with  reason.     Perhaps  it 
was  not  so  spontaneous. 

However  it  was,  Lowell  wrote  no  more 
on  politics  for  some  time,  nor,  indeed, 
on  any  other  matter  that  now  has  great 
interest.  His  articles  were  largely  book 
reviews.  His  editorship  and  his  pro 
fessorship*  evidently  were  taking  all  his 
time  and  energy,  and  there  was  little  left 
to  spare.  But  the  Presidential  election 
of  1860,  and  the  events  of  the  beginning 
of  1861,  were  things  that  made  a  call  on 
a  man.  Lowell  responded  with  "The 
November  Election/'  "The  Question  of 
the  Hour,"  "E  Pluribus  Unum,"  "The 
Pickens-and-Stealin> s  Eebellion, " — the 
last  in  June,  1861,  by  which  time  Lowell 
had  already  given  up  the  editorship  of 
the  Atlantic  to  Mr.  James  T.  Fields. 

On  these  political  articles  it  would  not 
be  easy  to  form  a  critical  opinion  to-day, 
even  if  it  were  necessary  for  our  present 
purposes.  They  are  praised  by  some 


JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL  67 
who  read  them  when  they  came  out ;  and 
Lowell  included  them  in  his  Works,  al 
though  they  were  not  republished  at  the 
time.  It  does  not  seem  to  me  that  they 
are  written  in  just  the  tone  for  such  a 
time :  they  seem  hardly  vital  enough. 
"My  very  style/'  he  wrote  later,  " be 
longs  to  the  last  century.7'  It  is  one 
thing  to  stir  up  the  prevalent  opinion  of 
a  political  adversary  by  good-natured 
ridicule  and  common  sense,  but  some 
thing  more  is  needed  in  a  crisis  such  as 
that  of  the  first  months  of  1861.  These 
articles  had  something  more ;  but  still, 
as  I  read  them,  it  seems  as  if  they  did 
not  have  all  that  was  needed. 

With  his  handing  over  the  editorship 
of  the  Atlantic  to  Mr.  Fields,  LowelPs 
mind  must  have  turned  to  poetry.  Mr. 
Norton  urged  him  to  read  poetry  ;  and 
probably,  now  that  he  had  more  time,  he 
did  so.  Constant  and  regular  work  is 
apt  to  be  a  great  dissuader  from  much 
reading  of  peetry.  But,  even  had  he 


68  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 
still  been  responsible  for  the  Atlantic,  it 
is  probable  that  his  mind  would  have 
naturally  turned  to  the  idea  of  more 
"Biglow  Papers. "  The  first  series, 
edited  in  England  not  long  before  by 
Thomas  Hughes,  would  have  recalled  the 
idea  to  him,  had  it  been  necessary.  But 
it  was  not  necessary  ;  and  nothing  gives  a 
better  idea  of  how  completely  the  first 
series  of  The  Biglow  Papers  had  done  its 
work  than  that  it  seemed  to  so  many 
natural,  when  there  was  a  call  for  a  rep 
resentative  of  the  patriotic  North,  that 
Hosea  Biglow  should  be  heard  from. 
For  a  year  and  more  he  was  heard  from. 
In  November,  1861,  was  a  letter  from 
Birdofredum  Sawin ;  and  from  time  to 
time  thereafter  till  Christmas,  1862, 
when  the  Rev.  Mr.  Wilbur  died,  there 
were  seven  numbers.  The  other  num 
bers  in  the  second  series  were  written 
in  1866. 

The  second  series  of  The  Biglow  Papers 
is  not  so  often  read  as  the  first^  and  I 


JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL  69 
suppose  is  not  so  good.  It  may  have 
been  for  the  general  reason  that  revivals 
are  always  dangerous.  Lowell  hints  at 
this  himself,  although  in  later  years  he 
thought  that  there  were  more  staying 
qualities  in  the  second  series  than  in  the 
first.  It  may  also  have  been  that  Low 
ell  was  a  professor  now,  and  fifteen  years 
older  than  he  had  been  when  he  wrote 
the  earlier  poems.  It  may  have  been, 
and  I  believe  it  mainly  was,  because  it 
was  one  thing  to  write  of  the  Mexican 
"War  in  opposition  to  it  and  quite  an- 
another  to  write  in  the  midst  of  the  agony 
of  the  Civil  War.  I  do  not  wonder 
that  the  second  Biglow  Papers  are  not 
equal  to  the  first.  The  first  series  was 
satirical :  what  was  there  for  the  second 
to  be  satirical  about!  The  real  time  to 
stir  men  to  right  feeling  and  right  action 
by  satire  and  ridicule  was  the  time  be 
tween  the  nomination  of  Lincoln  and  the 
first  battle  of  Bull  Eun.  After  Bull  Eun 
the  time  was  not  wholly  adapted  for 


70     JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL 
satire.     Lowell  had  poetry  for  the  war, 
but  it  was  not  satirical  poetry. 

And  yet  here  and  there  is  a  chance 
for  the  old  fire.  What,  in  the  first  series, 
is  better  than  "  Jonathan  to  John,"  or, 
in  another  way,  than  some  of  the  stanzas 
added  to  "The  Courtin7  "  ! 

But  the  year  1862  was  not  a  good  year 
for  Lowell  to  write  poetry.  In  October, 
1861,  Lieutenant  William  Lowell  Put 
nam  was  wounded  at  Ball's  Bluff,  and 
died  a  few  days  after.  In  June,  1862, 
Captain  James  Jackson  Lowell  was  mor 
tally  wounded  at  Glendale.  In  the  No 
vember  of  that  year  Colonel  Charles 
Bussell  Lowell  was  killed  in  a  skirmish 
at  Cedar  Creek.  These  three  young 
nephews  were  an  immense  loss  to  Lowell. 
He  had  no  sons  of  his  own,  but  he  felt 
the  deaths  of  these  sons  of  his  brother 
and  of  his  sister  almost  as  if  they  had 
been  of  those  dearest  to  him.  Some  years 
before,  looking  over  to  Mount  Auburn 
as  the  snow  fell  on  the  graves  there,  he 


JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL  71 
kissed  his  daughter  Mabel ;  but  he  says 
that  she  could  not  know 

"That  my  kiss  was  given  to  her  sister 
Folded  close  under  deepening  snow.77 

And  these  lines  may  give  us  a  sense  of 
the  feeling  of  personal  loss  that  lies  be 
neath  those  which  are  so  well  known  in 
the  No.  X.  of  The  Biglow  Papers,  writ 
ten  after  the  war  was  over. 

Still,  like  every  other  big-hearted  man 
at  the  North,  Lowell,  in  spite  of  his  per 
sonal  losses,  had  a  heart  for  his  country 
in  everything  ;  and  there  was  one  point 
on  which  his  satire  could  justly  be 
turned,  —  namely,  the  position  of  Eng 
land.  We  cannot  easily  understand  how 
keenly  Lowell  felt  the  hostile  attitude 
of  England  (in  fact,  at  this  moment  we 
are  rather  inclined  to  forget  the  whole 
'  matter)  unless  we  remember  how  proud 
he  was,  not  only  of  his  own  country,  but 
of  the  country  from  which  it  had  chiefly 
sprung*  For,  though  so  many  of  us  now 


72     JAMES  KUSSELL  LOWELL 

are  Swedes,  Hungarians,  Poles,  and 
Italians,  still,  as  a  people,  we  feel  that 
our  true  descent  is  from  England ;  and 
in  LowelFs  time  the  feeling  was  much 
stronger,  and  he  felt  it  more  keenly. 
Nothing  that  France  could  have  done, 
although  an  old  friend,  could  have  been 
so  galling.  For  England  to  side  with 
the  South  seemed  to  the  North  like  be 
ing  thrown  down  by  one  who  should  have 
helped  you  stand  firm.  But  all  this 
merely  served  to  bring  out  more  strong 
ly  LowelFs  loyalty  to  his  country  and 
his  faith  in  her  final  success. 

Toward  the  end  of  the  year  1863 
Lowell,  together  with  Mr.  Charles  Eliot 
Norton,  assumed  the  editorship  of  the 
North  American  Review.  "It  wanted 
three  elements  to  be  successful,"  he 
wrote  to  Motley  in  Vienna.  "It  wasn't 
thoroughly  — that  is,  thick  and  thinly  — 
loyal,  it  wasn't  lively,  and  it  had  no 
particular  opinions  on  any  particular 
subject.77  To  make  it  loyal  was  no  dif- 


JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL  73 
ficult  task.  Lowell  again  turned  his 
hand  to  political  articles,  and  wrote  first 
the  article  on  "The  President's  Policy/7 
which  may  be  found  with  some  additions 
in  the  present  essay  on  Abraham  Lincoln. 
For  three  years,  then,  he  wrote  political 
articles, — on  through  the  rest  of  the  war 
and  into  the  reconstruction  period.  For 
work  such  as  this  —  guiding  and  restrain 
ing  work  —  his  sound  sense  and  his  high 
ideals  gave  him  great  power,  and  he  used 
it.  Mr.  Norton  also  contributed  a  num 
ber  of  political  articles  ;  and,  although 
the  question  of  being  "  thick  and  thinly 
loyal "  happily  passed  away  with  the 
course  of  events,  yet  the  North  American 
Review  continued  to  hold  a  strong  posi 
tion  in  public  affairs.  After  1866,  how 
ever,  Lowell's  articles  were  no  longer 
political. 

In  1865  came  peace.  On  receiving 
the  news,  Lowell  wrote  to  Mr.  Norton : 
"The  news,  my  dear  Charles,  is  from 
heaven.  I  felt  a  strange  and  tender  ex- 


74  JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL 
altation.  I  wanted  to  laugh  and  I 
wanted  to  cry,  and  ended  by  holding 
my  peace  and  feeling  devoutly  thankful. 
There  is  something  magnificent  in  hav 
ing  a  country  to  love."  Now,  as  was 
his  custom,  the  feelings  that  had  been 
maturing  so  long  were  ready  to  find 
expression ;  and  an  occasion  offered 
itself  at  once.  On  Commencement  of 
that  year  Harvard  College  held  com 
memoration  exercises  for  those  of  her 
sons  who  had  fallen  in  the  war,  and 
Lowell  was  naturally  called  upon  for  the 
Ode.  Hardly  had  Harvard  herself  lost 
more  noble  sons  than  he. 

He  gave  himself  up  to  it  as  he  had  not 
given  himself  up  to  anything  for  ten 
years.  This  was  his  way,  this  was  the 
way  he  felt  he  could  write  poetry,  and 
only  in  this  way.  "To  carry  a  thing 
long  in  the  mind  is  my  recipe.  It  settles 
and  clarifies,  and  you  have  only  to  tap  it, 
and  draw  it  off  the  lees."  He  could  not 
easily  get  started;  but,  once  going,  he 


JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL  75 
relieved  his  heart  and  mind  by  verse  that 
was  almost  improvisation.  When  it 
was  done,  he  felt  satisfied:  he  felt,  and 
rightly,  that  he  had  again  written  poetry. 
At  the  moment  he  thought  that  the 
poem  did  not  make  the  effect  on  the 
audience  that  he  had  looked  for  :  he  said 
gloomily,  that  the  Daily  Advertiser  of  the 
next  day  had  called  it  "  a  very  graceful 
poem."  He  fell  into  the  unhappiness 
that  often  follows  the  heat  of  enthusiasm. 
He  thought  he  had  failed.  "The  fact 
is,"  he  wrote  to  Colonel  Higginson, 
"  that  the  Ode  was  written  at  a  heat, — 
such  a  one,  indeed,  as  leaves  one  colder 
than  common  afterwards. ' '  But  here  he 
must  have  been  not  unnaturally  wrong, — 
at  least,  if  the  testimony  of  others  is  of 
any  value.  The  Ode  was  not  only  fully 
equal  to  the  occasion,  not  only  listened 
to  with  exultation  by  those  who  at  last 
felt  due  utterance  of  the  emotion  of 
years,  but  it  was  also  the  best,  the  great 
est  poem  that  he  had  written.  It  has  his 


76  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 
greatest  merits,  and  it  lacks  his  defects. 
It  is  also  thoroughly  representative  of 
the  moods  and  the  feeling  of  the  poet, 
and  of  the  people  for  whom  he  acted  as 
spokesman. 


VI. 

"I  AM  ashamed  at  having  been  again 
tempted  into  thinking  I  could  write  po 
etry, —  a  delusion  from  which  I  have  been 
tolerably  free  these  dozen  years."  So 
wrote  Lowell  in  the  reaction  which  fol 
lowed  the  composition  of  his  greatest 
poem.  " These  dozen  years"  bring  us 
back  to  the  year  1853,  the  year  he  was 
meditating  those  lectures  on  the  English 
Poets  which  showed  that  no  other  could 
rightly  be  the  successor  of  Longfellow. 
During  these  years  of  work  as  a  profes 
sor,  and  afterward  as  an  editor,  he  had 
frequently  felt  a  lack  of  poetic  power. 
And,  although  this  feeling  was  frequently 
shaken  by  a  fine  verse  or  a  fine  poem, 
yet  we  can  easily  see  that  there  was 
ground  for  it.  If  you  spend  ten  hours 
out  of  the  twenty-four  in  hard  intellect 
ual  work,  you  are  less  likely  to  write 
poetry  than  if  you  do  not.  That  is  about 
the  way  we  may  look  at  the  question.  It 


78  JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL 
is  true  that  about  this  time  Lowell  was  be 
ginning  to  feel  a  sort  of  compensation : 
he  was  beginning  to  contribute  to  the 
North  American  Review  those  essays  on 
the  great  figures  of  literature  of  which 
it  will  be  soon  time  to  speak.  But,  cer 
tainly,  he  often  had  the  feeling  that  his 
days  as  a  poet  were  numbered.  It  was 
not  for  two  or  three  years  yet  that  he  re 
gained  his  surety  of  feeling  enough  to 
collect  what  he  had  written  since  his  last 
volume. 

To  this  collection  he  gave  the  name 
Under  the  Willows,  not  only  as  the  title 
of  the  June  Idyl  that  came  first,  but 
because  the  poems  called  back  so  many 
moods  knit  into  Elmwood,  and  those 
willows  which  he  then  feared  were  soon 
to  become  a  thing  of  the  past.  He  did 
not  think  too  highly  of  them,  when  he 
had  got  them  all  together ;  but  he  felt 
that  he  should  feel  freer,  were  they  once 
between  covers.  He  was  apt  to  feel  this 
way.  In  1847  he  wrote:  "My  pieces 


JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL  79 
hamper  me  till  I  get  them  shut  up  in  a 
book.  Then  I  feel  free  of  them,  and  can 
do  better. "  Twenty  years  after  he  says, 
although,  to  tell  the  truth,  not  of  all  of  the 
poems,  i  i  I  was  mainly  induced  to  print 
them  that  I  might  get  rid  of  them  by 
shutting  them  between  two  covers." 

But  this  collection  of  the  actual  year- 
to-year  record  of  twenty  years'  feelings 
and  thoughts  is  somehow  less  real  than 
the  poetical  review  of  which  it  may  well 
have  been  the  cause.  I  have  seen  The 
Cathedral  criticised  as  not  having  been 
spontaneous.  I  can  hardly  think  that 
this  can  have  been  so.  In  his  own 
letters  he  says,  "I  was  happy  writing 
it."  But  the  poem  itself  is  better  evi 
dence  than  anything  one  can  say  about 
it.  It  is  not  generally  thought  the  best 
of  Lowell's  poems ;  but  read  it  at  just 
this  moment  of  his  life,  and  see  whether 
he  ever  wrote  anything  more  thoroughly/ 
himself.  That  may  not  be  a  very  sound 
basis  for  literary  criticism  ;  but  for  us 


80  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 
now,  who  are  concerned  in  seeing  how 
the  life  of  Lowell  shaped  itself  and  de 
veloped,  it  is  surely  to  the  purpose. 
The  name  "The  Cathedral'7  is  acciden 
tal.  It  would  be  more  accurately  named 
in  prose,  —  ' '  James  Eussell  Lowell,  the 
Poet,  and  his  Eelation  to  his  Time." 

That  is  to  say,  in  this  poem  Lowell 
found  voice  after  many  years  of  partial 
utterance,  of  half-silence, — found  in  the 
recollection  of  a  trivial  day  abroad  the 
subtle  alchemy  which  distilled  from  so 
many  moods,  so  many  memories,  the  pure 
quintessence  which  the  world  might 
keep.  Nothing  else  that  he  ever  wrote 
expresses  so  fully  his  poetical  nature, 
that  part  of  himself  which  he  often  (be 
fore  and  afterward)  felt  was  the  real 
himself.  Everything  is  there :  nature, 
religion,  art,  the  past,  democracy  ;  early 
enthusiasms,  even  the  contradiction  of 
poetry  and  scholarship,  the  pressure  of 
daily  labors,  the  war,  the  doubts  of  re 
construction  times  j  the  half- diffuse  ex- 


JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL  81 
uberance,  the  quaint  figure,  the  incon 
gruous  whimsicality  or  triviality,  the 
happy  turn  and  word,  even  satire, 
though  satire  is  generally  dissolved  in 
feeling, —  all  carried  along  by  the  life, 
the  movement,  the  strength,  of  the  emo 
tions  which  reached  their  flood-tides  in 
these  moments  of  his  inspiration. 

We  cannot  go  through  The  Cathe 
dral,  and  say,  "So  Lowell  thought," 
"  This  Lowell  was."  I  suppose  it  might 
not  be  hard  to  pick  out  verses  of  which 
the  thought  is  directly  contradicted  by 
what  he  said  and  felt  at  other  times. 
But  the  dialectic  of  poetry  often  finds 
its  most  undoubtable  affirmations  in  such 
contradictions.  Some  things,  like  the 
walls  of  Camelot,  were  never  so,  and  are 
therefore  so  forever.  The  poem  itself 
says  that  moments  of  appreciation  are 
never  again  what  they  once  were  ;  that 
they  come  back  to  us  in  recollection, 
' '  blurred  with  the  mist  of  afterthought ?  ? ; 
that  they  are  as  short  as  the  ' i  wave' s  poise 


82  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 
before  it  break  in  pearl."  But,  really, 
the  moment  of  which  the  poem  is  the 
immortality  was  like  the  wave's  poise 
only  because  it  had  been  upheaved  from 
the  depths  of  an  ocean  that  receded  far 
and  far  toward  the  dim  horizon  of  mem 
ory.  It  was  a  moment  in  which  Lowell 
knew  himself  as  poet,  and  almost  the  last 
such  moment.  He  was  hereafter  to  be 
known  best  as  he  will  be  known  longest. 
For  it  was  not  until  1870  or  even  1871 
that  the  chance  reader  had  the  possibility 
of  knowing  Lowell  at  his  best,  so  far  as 
any  particular  form  of  literature  was 
concerned  ;  namely,  as  an  essayist.  Con- 
versations  on  Some  of  our  Old  Poets  was 
published  in  1844,  but  it  had  run  out  of 
print ;  and,  even  if  it  had  not,  Lowell 
had  got  beyond  it.  A  number  of  essays, 
Fireside  Travels,  published  in  magazines 
about  the  same  time,  came  to  belated 
book-form  in  the  sixties.  He  had  writ 
ten  many  articles  for  the  Atlantic  and 
North  American  Review,  but  the  curious 


JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL  83 
custom  of  printing  articles  unsigned  in 
those  magazines  during  the  greater  part 
of  the  time  in  which  he  had  written  for 
them  made  it  more  or  less  doubtful  if 
the  readers  always  knew  when  they  were 
reading  his  work.  In  1870,  however, 
he  gathered  up  a  number  of  the  essays 
which  had  appeared  in  the  North  Ameri 
can  Review,  and  published  them  under 
the  title  of  Among  my  Books.  In  1871 
he  published  another  collection  of  essays, 
called  My  Study  Windows,  and  in  1876  a 
third  collection, —  a  second  series  of 
Among  my  Books. 

In  these  collections  we  have  twenty- 
five  essays  which  will  probably  last  long 
er  than  anything  else  of  LowelPs.  The 
greater  number  of  them  were  written 
between  the  years  1865  and  1875.  What 
prose  he  had  written  before  remains  un 
read  by  the  great  mass  of  readers.  What 
he  wrote  subsequently  never  has  had  any 
such  acceptance  and  never  will  be  so 
widely  known.  What  he  wrote  in  other 


84  JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL 
forms,  though  sometimes  more  eagerly 
appreciated  at  the  moment,  will  probably 
not  remain,  save  for  a  dozen  exceptional 
pieces  ;  and  even  these,  however  express 
ive  of  himself,  are  not  the  best  things  of 
their  kind,  and  will  have  less  and  less 
chance  of  life  as  the  world  goes  on. 

The  best  of  Lowell's  essays,  however, 
I  am  inclined  to  believe,  are  as  good 
essays,  as  such,  as  there  are.  For  criti 
cism,  for  scholarship,  for  philosophy, 
these  magazine  articles  have  been  sur 
passed.  But,  as  essays,  they  are  not 
easily  equalled.  This  may  seem  an  ab 
surd  statement,  or,  rather,  it  may  seem 
as  though  I  were  endeavoring  to  dis 
tinguish  the  thought  of  these  essays  from 
their  form,  and  to  praise  the  latter  at 
the  expense  of  the  former.  I  am  not 
trying  to  do  that.  It  is  just  because  the 

i  expression  in  these  essays  so  exactly  fits 
the  thought,  because  the  essays  are  so 
admirably  expressive  of  Lowell  think- 

\ing,  that  I  think  them  so  good. 


JAMES  KUSSELL  LOWELL     85 

They  are  of  two  classes,  or,  perhaps, 

better  of  four.     First,  those  on  literature, 

—  the  essays  on  "Dante,"  the  "Library 
of  Old  Authors,"   "Bousseau,"    "Less- 
ing,"  and   on  the  great  English  poets 
from    Chaucer    to    Wordsworth.     Next 
are    essays    on    current    criticism    on 
"Carlyle,"  "Emerson,"  "Swinburne," 
"Thoreau."     Next  on   what  might  be 
called  history    more    or  less    recent, — 
"Witchcraft,"     "New    England    Two 
Centuries  Ago,"  "A  Great  Public  Char 
acter,  "  "  Abraham  Lincoln, ' '  and,  lastly, 

—  I  don't  know  precisely  under  what 
head    to  group    them, —  "My    Garden 

j  Acquaintance,"  "A  Good  Word  for 
Winter,"  "On  a  Certain  Condescen 
sion  in  Foreigners."  This  arrangement 
makes  them  look  rather  bookish  on  the 

;  whole,  but  an  essay  is  apt  to  be  bookish ; 
and  Lowell,  even  though  he  did  not 
really  look  out  on  the  world  through 
books,  was  very  likely  to  settle  his  own 
reflections  on  life  by  the  fish-skin  (or 


86     JAMES   BUSSELL  LOWELL 
egg,   if  you    prefer)    of  another  man's 
printed  page. 

For  the  most  part  the  essays  were 
printed  just  as  they  had  appeared  in  the 
North  American  Review.  Some,  however, 
had  first  come  out  in  the  Atlantic  /  and 
some  were  rewritings  of  older  articles. 
Even  the  review  articles  had  sometimes 
been  rewritten  or  condensed  from  previ 
ous  material.  Still,  almost  all  took  form 
in  the  years  we  are  now  writing  of ;  and 
they  serve  to  give  us  an  idea  of  how  he 
passed  his  time  in  those  years,  of  how 
his  mind  worked.  Lowell  was  himself 
rather  of  the  opinion  that  the  essay  on 
Dryden  was  his  best  essay.  I  have  no 
idea  on  what  he  based  this  view.  It 
may  have  been  but  a  fancy,  or  it  may 
have  been  that  the  essay  more  exactly 
expressed  the  ideas  he  had  had  in  mind 
when  writing  than  any  of  the  others, — 
a  thing  which  must  always  be  very  satis 
factory  to  the  writer.  Were  it  not  for 
this  view  of  Lowell  himself,  I  should 


JAMES  RUSSELL  LOWELL  87 
pronounce  confidently  in  favor  of  the 
essay  on  "  Emerson,  the  Lecturer. "  In 
the  narrow  compass  of  this  short  essay 
we  have  the  essence  of  Lowell's  best 
prose,  and,  I  had  almost  said,  of  Emer 
son,  too  5  but  that  would  be  going  a  little 
too  far. 

But,  whether  it  be  one  or  the  other 
that  is  the  best  of  all,  the  quality  of 
the  essays  in  general  is  indisputable. 
Lowell  has  thought  on  fine  things,  and 
expressed  himself  most  naturally  with 
the  richness  of  a  full  mind  and  the  fancy 
of  a  subtle  mind  ;  and  the  result  is  that 
we  cannot  read  him  without  our  mind 
also  taking  energy  to  some  degree  at 
least,  and  that  we  call  being  interested. 

I  classed  the  essays  in  one  way  a  mo 
ment  ago,  but  now  we  may  think  of 
them  in  another.  This  essay  on  Emerson 
is  not  only  an  essay  in  current  criticism, 
but  it  is  very  distinctly  a  New  England 
essay;  and  so  are  those  on  "Thoreau," 
on  "  Josiah  Quincy,"  on  "  Witchcraft, " 


88  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 
on  "New  England  Two  Centuries  Ago ' ' ; 
and  so,  on  the  whole,  are  those  on  "  My 
Garden  Acquaintance/'  "A  Good  Word 
for  Winter,7'  and  "A  Certain  Conde 
scension."  The  others  are  the  essays  of 
the  critic  ;  but  these,  we  cannot  but  feel, 
are  rather  more  the  essays  of  the  man. 
These  are  not  merely  essays  of  Lowell's 
study.  They  are  essays  of  all  Elmwood, 
with  its  birds  and  its  trees  5  of  all  Cam 
bridge,  with  its  dear  friends  and  famous 
thinkers ;  of  New  England,  now  and 
centuries  back.  Lowell,  the  professor, 
lectures  charmingly  on  English  literature 
from  Chaucer  to  Wordsworth ;  but  here, 
to  my  mind  at  least,  we  have  more  of 
the  life  and  spirit  of  the  man. 

And  the  form  of  the  essays  follows  so 
easily  and  agrees  so  wholly  with  the 
fluent  thought,  is  the  thought  even,  we 
might  almost  say.  They  are  so  full  of 
figure  and  allusion,  and  therefore  so  rich, 
so  full  of  kindness  and  sympathy,  and 
therefore  so  vital,  so  full  of  good  sense 


JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL  89 
and  good  thought,  and  therefore  so 
sound.  The  essay  on  Emerson  I  like, 
because  it  has  in  very  short  compass 
much  that  is  very  characteristic  of  Low 
ell  and  of  his  way  of  thinking.  Take 
merely  the  figures  that  he  loved  (in 
poetry  or  in  prose),  and  see  what  sort  of 
things  were  running  in  his  head.  He 
was  always  comparing  his  idea  to  some 
lovely  thing  in  nature,  or  he  was  illus 
trating  it  by  some  allusion  to  a  favorite 
book,  or  he  had  seen  some  quaint  resem 
blance  to  some  every -day  affair.  Doubt 
less,  now  and  then,  his  reading  will  take 
him  out  of  the  reach  of  yours.  You  may 
not  remember  about  the  nameless  eagle 
of  the  Ygdrasil,  or  the  profanity  of  Marl- 
borough's  army;  but  these  are  small 
matters,  nor  are  they  common  in  this 
particular  essay.  You  can  tell  what  he 
means  when  he  speaks  of  ua  kind  of 
undertow  in  that  rich  barytone  of  his 
that  sweeps  our  minds  from  their  foot 
hold  into  deeper  waters  with  a  drift  we 


90  JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL 
cannot  and  would  not  resist/7  or  of 
"some  flash  of  humor  which  always 
played  about  the  horizon  of  his  mind, 
like  heat  lightning77  ;  and  always  you 
are  conscious  of  that  something  which 
with  Lowell,  as  with  Dry  den,  "gave 
flavor  to  whatever  he  wrote, — a  very 
rare  quality.77 

And,  surely,  it  is  as  the  New  Englander 
that  Lowell  is  most  himself,  will  be  best 
remembered,  rather  than  as  the  critic 
who  wrote  the  essays  on  English  litera 
ture.  Canons  of  criticism  change,  and 
the  critic7  s  reputation  is  apt  to  become 
a  reputation  by  courtesy.  Not  to  dis 
parage  Lowell7  s  other  essays,  it  may  still 
be  said  that  they  gain  half  their  charm 
now,  not  from  the  keenness  or  inspira 
tion  of  the  thought,  but  from  the  homely 
yet  golden  nature  of  the  thinker. 


VII. 

WITH  the  year  1872  Lowell  seems  to 
have  felt  the  need  of  having  a  little 
more  fun.  He  had  done  a  good  deal  of 
work.  He  had  been  professor  for  seven 
teen  years ;  he  had  been  an  editor  for 
fifteen.  He  had  got  together  his  poems 
and  published  them,  and  had  gathered 
two  volumes  of  essays.  He  felt  that  he 
deserved  a  vacation.  "If  everything 
goes  well/'  he  wrote  to  Mr.  Leslie 
Stephen,  "I  mean  to  go  abroad  in  a 
year  from  last  June, — that  is,  at  the 
end  of  our  next  college  year ;  and,  if  I 
do,  you  will  see  a  youth  you  never 
saw  before. "  This  youth  was  the  re 
generate  Lowell :  the  old  man  Lowell 
Mr.  Stephen  had  seen  when  he  visited 
America  during  the  war. 

So  far  as  England  was  concerned,  it 
was  really  a  different  Lowell,  or  rather 
the  same  Lowell  with  a  mood  naturally 
changed  by  circumstances.  As  was  most 


92  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 
natural  for  a  man  so  devoted  to  the 
literature  of  England  and  to  the  princi 
ples  of  democracy  which  England  has 
championed  so  long,  Lowell  had  had  a 
most  kindly  feeling  for  England  herself. 
The  appreciation  of  The  Biglow  Papers 
in  England  was  very  grateful  to  him. 
It  made  him  feel  that  he  was  doing 
something  worthy  of  being  considered 
after  the  works  of  the  great  authors  he 
admired  so  much.  Only  a  year  before 
the  war  he  wrote  to  Thomas  Hughes, 
who  was  to  edit  an  English  reprint  of 
The  Biglow  Papers,  "It  has  been  a  par 
ticular  satisfaction  to  me  to  hear,  now 
and  then,  some  friendly  voice  from  the 
old  mother  island  say,  '  Well  done ! ?  of 
The  Biglow  Papers." 

But,  when  the  Civil  War  broke  out, 
Lowell  was  grievously  disappointed  in 
the  position  of  England,  or  at  least  of 
her  representative  men  and  newspapers. 
"Cross  as  terriers  at  your  kind  of  neu 
trality/'  he  wrote  to  Hughes  in  one  of 


JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL  93 
the  very  few  letters  lie  sent  to  England 
at  this  time;  but  "cross,"  as  any  one 
will  remember  from  the  second  Biglow 
Papers,  was  rather  a  mild  word  to  de 
scribe  his  state  of  mind.  At  the  end 
of  the  war  he  wrote,  "I  share  with  a 
great  body  of  my  countrymen  in  a  bit 
terness  (half  resentment  and  half  regret) 
which  I  cannot  yet  get  over."  Still, 
when  Longfellow  went  to  England  not 
long  afterward,  Lowell,  with  the  others 
of  the  Club,  "  folio  wed  his  triumphal 
progress  with  pride  and  sympathy,"  so 
that  he  even  rather  wished  himself  on 
the  other  side  once  more.  And,  since  it 
was  not  the  acts  of  England  so  much  as 
the  feeling,  the  spirit  of  the  nation,  it 
was  not  unnatural  that  such  events  as 
the  Treaty  of  Washington,  providing 
for  the  "Alabama"  arbitration,  should 
have  done  much  to  convince  him  that 
things  were  not  quite  as  they  had  been. 
He  wanted  to  see  that  England  felt  that 
she  had  mistaken  her  true  interest  in 


94  JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL 
the  sympathy  she  had  shown  for  the 
South.  And,  finally,  he  came  to  think 
even  that  it  had  not  been  so  much  the 
feeling  of  England  as  the  tone  in  which 
it  had  been  expressed. 

He  did  go  abroad,  and,  as  if  to  show 
that  " Jonathan  to  John'7  had  left  no 
lasting  trace,  the  University  of  Oxford 
conferred  on  him  the  degree  of  D.C.L., 
and  the  next  year  Cambridge  gave  him 
the  LL.D.  As  a  university  man  himself 
and  as  a  -man  of  public  reputation,  he 
was  naturally  much  pleased  at  these  dis 
tinctions;  and  England  was  safe  in  his 
good  graces  again,  as -he  was  in  hers. 
The  winter  of  1872-73,  however,  he 
spent  in  Paris,  and  the  next  winter  in 
Italy,  though  not  without  visits  to  Lon 
don.  In  the  summer  of  1874  he  came 
back  to  America  and  was  heartily  glad 
to  find  himself  at  home  again.  He  was 
never  happy,  he  sometimes  thought, 
away  from  Elmwood ;  and,  certainly,  he 
was  surrounded  by  a  group  of  friends 


JAMES  KUSSELL  LOWELL  95 
there  who  made  life  delightful  to  him. 
We  are  apt  to  imagine  that  distinguished 
men  must  always  have  other  distin 
guished  men  for  their  friends.  It  is  not 
always  so.  Distinguished  men  get  to  a 
curiously  just  estimate  of  the  value  of 
fame,  in  part,  perhaps,  by  seeing  among 
their  friends  men  of  quite  as  much  char 
acter  or  even  ability  as  the  most  famous 
of  all,  who  remain  entirely  out  of  the 
eye  of  the  public.  Lowell  was  the  inti 
mate  friend  of  Longfellow,  Emerson,  and 
Holmes,  and  saw  them  often.  But  quite 
as  near  his  heart  were  others ;  and,  if 
when  abroad  he  felt  homesick,  as  he 
sometimes  did,  we  may  be  quite  sure 
that  it  was  not  merely  the  society  of 
Longfellow,  Emerson,  and  Holmes  that 
he  missed.  Other  old  friends  were  espe 
cially  dear  to  him  (though  names  and 
gifts  need  not  be  here  recorded) ;  and 
one  of  the  great  charms  of  Cambridge 
was  that  there  he  continued  the  friend 
ships  that  had  long  come  of  age,  and 


96  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 
were  indeed  now  stretching  on  toward 
the  fortieth  and  fiftieth  year.  It  should 
have  been  said  some  time  before,  but 
that  the  continuity  of  other  lines  would 
have  been  broken  thereby,  that  in  1856 
Lowell  married  Miss  Frances  Dunlap,  a 
lady  who  had  for  some  years  had  the 
care  of  his  daughter  Mabel.  Thus  Elm- 
wood  had  again  become  a  home,  in  the 
fullest  sense  of  the  word.  Here,  too,  I 
ought  to  commemorate  a  constant  fac 
tor  in  Lo welPs  life;  namely,  the  famous 
whist  club  which  gathered  once  a  week 
for  fifty  years,  with  Mr.  John  Bartlett 
and  Mr.  John  Holmes  as  the  most  regu 
lar  members. 

While  abroad,  he  had  rejoiced  his 
heart  with  the  thought  of  giving  up  his 
professorship.  He  had  always  liked  to 
think  of  it  as  something  of  a  cross :  we 
have  seen  that  he  made  it  the  scapegoat 
for  his  unpoetical  moments.  It  would 
be  impossible  to  say,  hardly  worth  while 
to  try  to  guess,  what  might  have  been  his 


JAMES  KUSSELL  LOWELL  97 
fortune,  had  he  declined  the  offer  made 
him  almost  twenty  years  before.  Would 
he  have  been  more  possessed  by  poetry  ? 
We  might  as  well  speculate  as  to  what 
would  have  resulted,  had  he  tried  to 
write  a  novel,  as  Mr.  Fields  once  asked 
him.  He  himself  always  thought,  as 
has  been  said,  that  his  professorship  had 
stood  in  the  way  of  his  success  in  poetry. 
Some  years  after  this  he  wrote  to  another 
author,  who  had  been  offered  a  professor 
ship,  "If  you  are  able  now,  without 
overworking  mind  and  body,  to  keep 
the  wolf  from  the  door  and  to  lay  by 
something  for  a  rainy  day,  ...  I  should 
refuse  the  offer,"  said  he,  and  went  on, 
"If  you  are  a  systematic  worker,  inde 
pendent  of  moods,  and  sure  of  your 
genius  whenever  you  want  it,  there  might 
be  no  risk  in  accepting."  When  we 
think  that  Lowell  was  not  a  very  sys 
tematic  worker,  not  independent  of 
moods,  not  sure  of  his  genius  whenever 
he  wanted  it,  and  that  he  was  quite 


98  JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL 
aware  of  his  own  character  in  this  direc 
tion,  we  can  see  what  he  really  thought 
of  the  matter.  We  have  seen  that  Low- 
elFs  scholarship  was  no  great  aid  to  his 
poetry.  Still  there  is  room  for  thinking 
that  the  practical  man-to-man  work  of  a 
professor  is  a  good  thing  for  those  who 
wish  to  understand  life. 

However  he  felt,  he  did  not  give  up 
his  professorship.  The  zero  weather  of 
the  winter  found  him  walking  to  and 
from  the  college,  where  he  lectured  on 
Old  French  and  Dante.  Nor  was  he 
without  poetic  moments,  for  here  belong 
the  three  Centennial  Odes. 

In  the  autumn  of  1876  he  had  a  new 
experience :  he  was  chosen  one  of  the 
electors  of  the  President  of  the  United 
States.  The  office  is  an  honorary  one, 
for  an  elector  is  supposed  to  vote  as  his 
constituents  desire ;  but  the  point  is  one 
of  interest  in  the  life  of  Lowell.  He  had, 
of  course,  always  done  his  best  in  public 
matters.  But  he  began  as  a  writer  who 


JAMES  EUSSELL   LOWELL     99 

does  his  work  with  his  pen;  and  as  a 
writer  he  had  continued,  as  has  been  seen. 
He  had  never  been  without  what  our 
American  phrase  calls  "activity"  in 
politics.  Now,  however,  came  an  occa 
sion  ;  namely,  a  Presidential  election. 
The  eight  years  of  General  Grant's  hold 
ing  office  had  not  been  marked  by  an 
exceptionally  lofty  tone  in  politics  ;  and 
Lowell,  who  was  very  proud  of  his 
country  in  the  best  way,  had  even  under 
Grant's  first  administration  writhed  a 
good  deal  under  much  that  had  gone  on, 
although  he  believed  in  Grant  himself. 
But  it  would  seem  that  his  absence  from 
the  country  had  given  him  a  standpoint 
whence  he  could  see  more  clearly  than 
he  had  seen  at  home.  Certainly,  he  had 
not  been  at  home  very  long  before  he 
began  with  his  old  weapon.  Was  the 
time  for  it  gone  by?  At  any  rate,  he 
did  not  content  himself  with  satire  ;  but 
in  the  very  beginning  of  the  Presidential 
campaign  —  or,  rather,  of  the  campaign 


100  JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL 
for  the  delegates  to  the  Eepublican  Con 
vention —  he  "  appeared  in  a  new  ca 
pacity,  as  chairman  of  a  political  meet 
ing.  "  He  did  not  feel  particularly 
hopeful;  but  he  said,  "If  there  beany 
hope,  it  is  in  getting  independent  thinkers 
to  be  independent  voters. 7 ' 

He  wrote  to  Mr.  Leslie  Stephen  that  he 
feared  he  had  "  made  an  ass  of  himself. " 
Instead  of  this  he  had  practically  made 
himself  a  delegate  to  Cincinnati,  where 
he  was  extremely  interested  in  seeing 
America  as  he  had  never  seen  it  before. 
He  did  not  succeed  in  nominating  the 
candidate  whom  he  especially  favored, 
but  he  did  help  in  defeating  the  candi 
date  whose  nomination  he  felt  would 
have  been  a  national  calamity.  E.  B. 
Hayes  was  nominated,  and  Lowell  was 
named  one  of  the  Massachusetts  electors. 
It  seems,  however,  that,  although  actu 
ally  on  the  State  ticket,  he  had  had  him 
self  some  doubt  as  to  whether  he  would 
vote  for  Hayes  or  Tilden. 


JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL  101 
The  election  of  1876  was  a  contested 
election,  and  the  result  in  the  college  of 
electors  was  finally  decided  by  one  vote. 
Mr.  George  William  Curtis,  in  the  eu 
logy  on  Lowell  pronounced  at  Brooklyn, 
says  that,  "  in  the  multitude  of  electors, 
Lowell  alone  was  mentioned  as  one  who 
might  exercise  the  right77  of  voting  ac 
cording  to  his  judgment  rather  than 
according  to  instructions.  Lowell  would 
not  have  done  so,  for  he  believed  that 
acceptance  to  the  nomination  to  the 
electorship  was  a  tacit  promise  to  vote 
the  party  ticket.  But  the  incident  was 
regarded  as  proof  of  Lowell's  indepen 
dence  in  politics. 

Hayes  was  elected ;  and,  not  long  after 
he  had  become  President,  Lowell  was 
asked  to  represent  the  United  States  at 
one  of  the  courts  of  Europe.  Vienna 
and  Berlin  were  at  first  mentioned  5  but 
Lowell  seems  to  have  had  no  desire  to  go 
to  Germany  again,  and  he  declined  each. 
He  was  asked  then  if  he  would  not  go  to 


102  JAMES  RUSSELL  LOWELL 
Spain,  having  in  some  way  let  it  be 
known  that  he  was  not  so  averse  to 
Madrid.  It  was  an  honorable  position, 
and  probably  he  had  some  thought  that 
he  would  like  the  chance  of  knowing  a 
little  better  the  language  of  his  favorite 
Calderon.  So,  like  Washington  Irving 
before  him,  he  became  minister  to  Spain; 
and,  with  many  regrets  at  leaving  Elm- 
wood  and  the  birds,  he  proceeded  in  a 
leisurely  manner  to  Madrid,  which  he 
reached  the  middle  of  August,  1877. 
Our  diplomatic  and  consular  service  is 
a  peculiar  thing.  It  can  hardly  be  said 
to  be  governed  by  any  fixed  principle ; 
but,  among  the  various  principles  that 
more  or  less  affect  it,  one  is  that  it  is 
well  to  appoint  men  of  letters  now  and 
then.  When  you  consider  that  men  of 
letters  are  not  generally  thought  of  as 
eminently  practical  persons,  it  seems 
curious  that  they  should  be  held  espe 
cially  qualified  to  manage  the  affairs  of 
their  country  in  foreign  lands.  Lowell 


JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL     103 

was  certainly  one  of  the  most  practical 
men  of  letters  we  have  had,  for  his  great 
distinction  had  been  that  he  had  known 
how  to  use  letters  as  a  force  in  public 
affairs.  He  was  a  poet;  but  he  had 
never  secluded  himself  and  fed  on  bee- 
food, —  at  least,  never  for  a  long  time. 

He  remained  in  Spain  only  two  years 
and  a  half,  and  gradually  grew  to  enjoy 
himself  very  much,  although  he  had 
frequent  desires  to  go  home.  He  de 
voted  himself  to  the  study  of  Spanish, — 
a  spirited  proceeding  in  a  man  of  nearly 
sixty, —  working  with  a  professor  two 
hours  a  day,  translating  French  into 
Spanish,  and,  in  fact,  working  almost  as 
hard  as  he  had  worked  in  Dresden.  But 
his  stay  was  not  absolutely  to  his  liking. 
In  1880  he  was  fortunately  transferred  to 
England. 

It  was  fortunate  that  Lowell  was  trans 
ferred  to  England,  not  only  because  he 
had  in  England  a  remarkably  delight 
ful  time,  but  chiefly  because  he  was 


104  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 
such  an  excellent  representative  of  his 
country  there.  It  was  not  so  much 
what  he  did  as  what  he  was  that  made 
him  excellent ;  for  his  labors  were  not 
very  arduous,  except  in  the  cases  of  a 
number  of  Americans,  whose  very  close 
relations  to  Ireland  at  a  time  of  some 
delicacy  led  to  complications.  It  was 
not,  however,  what  Lowell  did,  but 
what  he  was,  that  made  him  so  good  a 
representative  of  his  country.  It  cannot 
with  truth  be  said  that  Lowell  was  a 
representative  American  because  there 
were  so  many  Americans  just  like  him. 
No,  he  was  not  a  realistic  representative 
of  America :  he  was  rather  an  idealiza 
tion  of  America.  His  qualities  were,  on 
the  whole,  American  qualities, —  his  hu 
mor,  his  common  sense,  his  democratic 
breadth,  his  love  of  nature,  his  facility 
of  speech.  And,  without  wishing  to 
appropriate  to  ourselves  all  the  excellent 
and  delightful  qualities  which  made 
Lowell  such  a  favorite  with  the  best 


JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL  105 
people  in  England,  we  may  at  least  be 
glad  that  we  had  such  a  man  to  be  even 
technically  our  representative. 

But  Lowell  was  our  representative  in 
other  than  official  ways.  He  was  the 
one  to  speak  on  the  dedication  of  a  bust 
in  Westminster  Abbey  to  Longfellow. 
He  spoke  at  the  great  memorial  meeting 
held  at  Exeter  Hall  on  the  death  of 
President  Garfield.  He  spoke  to  the 
Midland  Institute  on  Democracy.  For 
was  he  merely  the  proper  person  to 
speak  on  such  occasions.  He  seemed 
to  be  as  gifted  as  an  occasional  orator  as 
he  was  as  a  poet  or  essayist.  He  spoke 
also  many  other  times  when  England  was 
glad  to  hear  what  the  New  England 
critic  had  to  say  on  Gray,  Coleridge, 
Pepys.  And  on  a  thousand  private 
i  occasions,  also,  Lowell  did  for  one  or 
another  group  of  people  what  he  was 
doing  for  the  people  of  England  as  a 
whole. 

When  Cleveland   was  elected    Presi- 


106     JAMES   RUSSELL  LOWELL 

dent,  it  became  probable  that  Lowell, 
according  to  the  common  custom,  would 
be  recalled  on  account  of  difference  in 
politics.  He  had  been  appointed  by  a 
Republican  President ;  but,  as  far  as 
politics  were  concerned,  it  is  very  prob 
able  that,  had  he  been  in  America  dur 
ing  the  Presidential  campaign,  he  would 
have  voted  the  Democratic  ticket.  Still, 
by  unhappy  fortune,  it  fell  out  that  he 
was  very  glad  to  be  relieved  from  duty. 
In  the  winter  of  1884  his  wife  died ;  and 
he  came  back  to  America, — glad  to  be 
away  from  England,  glad  to  get  home, 
but  without  any  special  care  whether  he 
were  minister  or  not. 

These  years  now  to  come  —  the  last  six 
years  of  Lowell's  life  —  we  are  apt  to 
look  upon  as  being,  on  the  whole,  melan 
choly  and  pathetic.  There  is  some  rea 
son  for  the  feeling ;  for  the  years  began 
with  the  lost  feeling  that  is  left  by  the 
death  of  one  we  have  loved  and  de 
pended  on,  and  they  ended  with  the 


JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL  107 
pain  and  trouble  of  recurrent  illness.  It 
is  to  be  said,  also,  that  Lowell  did 
not  return  to  the  old  place  which  he 
loved  so  dearly,  nor  to  the  duties  which 
had  made  up  his  life,  even  when  he  had 
girded  at  them.  Then  the  feeling  of 
growing  old  is  always  in  itself  melan 
choly,  and  the  surviving  one's  old  friends 
and  one's  old  powers  is  painful. 

But  except  for  these  necessities,  as  we 
may  well  enough  call  them,  the  last  years 
of  Lowell's  life  were  singularly  happy. 
He  would  not  go  back  to  Elmwood  ;  but 
the  Deerfoot  Farm,  Southboro,  where 
he  went  to  live  with  his  daughter,  Mrs. 
Burnett, —  though  not  exactly  a  substi 
tute  in  kind, — was  a  place  where  he 
could  enjoy  himself  outdoors  and  in 
much  the  same  ways  that  had  always 
been  his  favorites.  He  came  back  also 
to  his  old  friends  —  to  those  oldest  friends 
—  whom  he  had  loved  for  so  many  years, 
and  to  those  a  bit  younger  who  were 
gradually  moving  up  into  the  places 


108  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 
which  were  falling  vacant.  To  the  old 
friends  of  his  study  he  also  came  back 
(if  we  can  say  that  he  ever  really  left 
them).  To  these  years  belong  several 
studies  in  literature, — on  Donne,  an  old 
favorite,  on  Izaak  Walton,  on  Landor. 
He  settled  down  for  occupations  and 
amusements,  much  as  was  natural,  con 
sidering  the  necessary  changes  in  circum 
stance.  Nor  was  there  a  trace  of  weak 
ening  of  his  powers.  It  is  true  that 
never  again  did  he  rise  quite  to  the 
height  which,  some  dozen  times  before, 
he  had  for  moments  touched.  But  that 
one  hardly  expects.  He  could  still  write 
poetry,  and  could  still  write  prose.  He 
did  not  entirely  give  up  college  work, 
but  for  the  first  years  had  his  class  at 
Harvard  on  Dante ;  and  he  lectured 
once  more  before  the  Lowell  Institute, 
this  time  upon  his  old-time  favorites, — 
the  Elizabethan  Dramatists.  He  was 
often  called  on  for  occasions :  at  the 
Harvard  Two  Hundred  and  Fiftieth  An- 


JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL  109 
niversary,  at  the  Centenary  of  the  Batifi  - 
cation  of  the  Constitution.  He  was,  per 
haps,  less  in  the  eye  of  the  public  than 
he  had  been  before  his  absence  in  Spain 
and  England ;  but  he  was  still  an  in 
fluence  in  America,  both  in  literature 
and  in  politics. 

His  summers  he  usually  spent  in  Eng 
land.  Going  over  in  April  or  May,  he 
would  stay  in  London  for  the  season,  and 
then  go  to  Whitby  in  the  north,  a  favor 
ite  place  with  him.  In  London  he  had 
many  friends  of  whom  he  was  very  fond ; 
but  he  had  also  that  curious  love  of  the 
great  city  itself,  the  fascination  for  the 
busy  world  of  men  and  (now)  of  women, 
which  you  are  very  apt  to  find  in  intel 
lectual  men,  especially  in  those  whose 
occupation  is  a  little  out  of  the  practical 
ordinary  run  of  things.  He  loved  the 
city  when  he  was  in  London,  and  he  had 
the  country  and  the  sea  when  he  was  at 
Whitby. 

In  1889  he  returned  to  Elmwood,  and 


110  JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL 
not  alone  ;  for  with  him  were  his  daugh 
ter  and  his  grandchildren.  And  here 
he  lived  until  his  death,  two  years  after 
ward.  The  great  pleasures  of  the  old 
are  unselfish.  When  a  man  passes 
seventy,  if  not  before,  he  is  apt  to  take 
his  greatest  pleasure  in  the  happiness  of 
those  about  him.  We  need  not  think 
much  of  Lowell  himself  during  these  last 
years,  for  he  was  not  over-thoughtful 
of  himself.  Beading  old  books  and 
looking  pleasantly  on  young  people,  he 
passed  the  time  easily  until  the  end 
(Aug.  12,  1891),  which,  if  not  happily 
sudden,  was  at  least  preceded  by  no 
weakness  of  the  mind  or  of  the  spirit. 


UNIVERSITY 
OF 


VIII. 

BEFORE  Lowell's  death  he  had  been 
felt  generally  and  rightly  to  be  the  rep-  \ 
resentative  American  man  of  letters  of 
his  day.  As  such  he  is  still  regarded, 
and  in  all  probability  time  will  never 
take  from  him  the  distinction  of  having 
been  the  successor  in  this  respect  of 
"Washington  Irving.  Other  reputations 
may  change,  but  this  one  is  likely  to 
endure  ;  for  it  is  rather  historical  than 
critical.  It  is  more  a  matter  of  fact  than 
a  question  of  taste. 

If  we  ask  what  is  to  be  understood 
by  the  phrase  "the  representative  man 
of  letters/'  we  may  say  at  once  that  it 
does  not  mean  the  greatest  genius,  in  the 
ordinary  acceptance  of  the  word.  John 
son  would  probably  be  taken  as  the  rep 
resentative  man  of  letters  of  his  time, 
although  he  was  not  such  a  poet  as  Gold 
smith  nor  even  a  man  of  such  pre-em 
inent  genius  in  so  many  directions. 


112  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 
Goldsmith  wrote  not  only  the  best 
poems,  but  the  best  comedies,  the  best 
novel,  the  best  essays  of  his  day.  John 
son  wrote  nothing  that  can  be,  or  rather 
that  is,  compared  with  them.  Bnt  John 
son,  not  Goldsmith,  is  the  representative 
man  of  letters.  In  like  manner  Dryden 
is  the  representative  man  of  letters  of  an 
earlier  day,  although  his  comedies  are 
not  so  good  as  those  of  Congreve  nor  his 
tragedies  as  those  of  Otway.  He  is  not 
a  greater  master  of  prose  than  Temple, 
nor  a  man  of  such  genius  or  influence  as 
Bunyan.  Still,  he  was  held  in  his  own 
day,  and  he  still  is,  the  chief  figure  in 
the  world  of  letters  of  his  time. 

So  with  Lowell.  As  a  poet,  he  was 
surpassed  by  Longfellow  and  Poe,  to 
consider  the  feeling  of  his  own  time  and 
of  ours.  As  a  scholar,  he  was  not  the 
superior  of  Whitney  or  of  Marsh.  As 
a  writer  of  prose,  he  is  neither  better  nor 
more  admired  than  Hawthorne  or  Park- 
man.  Nor  as  an  acknowledged  influ- 


JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL  113 
ence  among  thinking  men  was  he  the 
superior  of  Emerson  in  one  direction 
or  Beecher  in  the  other.  Neither  can 
we  say  that  he  reached  his  eminence 
through  no  especial  power  in  some  par 
ticular  direction,  but  through  energy  in 
all.  This  is  never  a  great  advantage  in 
the  world  of  letters,  so  far  as  fame  is  con 
cerned  :  it  is  a  disadvantage.  "Jack- 
of- all-trades'7  we  say,  when  a  man 
essays  all  departments  of  literature  and 
attains  the  first  place  in  none. 

The  pre-eminence  of  Lowell  was  quite 
justly  gained :  he  was  pre-eminent  in  a 
quality  which  has  not  yet  been  named, — 
a  quality  which  will  account  in  a  meas 
ure  for  eminence  in  so  many  lines  of 
literature,  even  without  pre-eminence  in 
any  of  them.  It  was  the  quality  that 
made  him  a  man  of  letters  in  a  sense 
almost  literal,  a  man  who  understood 
literature,  who,  on  feeling  himself  called 
upon  to  speak,  understood  thoroughly 
the  instrument  he  had  to  use,  even 


114     JAMES  EUSSELL   LOWELL 
though    unable    to    touch    its    greatest 
possibilities  in  any  particular  use. 

This  is  not  to  say  that  Lowell  was  a 
critic,  except  in  a  very  large  sense  of  the 
word.  He  was  a  critic,  it  is  true;  but 
it  was  not  because  he  was  a  critic,  as  we 
commonly  think  of  critics,  that  he  is 
a  more  representative  man  than  Emer 
son  or  Longfellow  or  Hawthorne.  It 
was  because  he  understood  better  the 
place  and  the  possibilities  of  literature 
in  the  life  around  him.  If  we  call  that 
being  a  critic  (and,  in  a  large  sense,  we 
may  well  do  so),  Lowell  was  mainly  a 
critic.  That  he  could  not  write  poetry 
like  Longfellow's,  nor  novels  like  those 
of  Hawthorne,  nor  essays  like  Emerson's, 
does  not  take  away  this  honor  from  him. 
/  Longfellow  wrote  poems,  not  because 
he  understood  that  certain  things  might 
be  done  by  means  of  poetry,  but  because 
he  liked  to  do  so.  Hawthorne  wrote 
novels,  not  to  exploit  any  purpose  or 
problem,  but  because  he  liked  to  write 


JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL  115 
novels.  Longfellow  was  popular,  Haw 
thorne  at  first  unpopular ;  but  the  one 
fact  does  not  show  the  powers  and  the 
other  does  not  show  the  limitations  of 
literature  as  a  force  in  life.  Nor  can  we 
say  that  Emerson  thoroughly  understood 
the  means  of  which  he  availed  himself. 
If  he  had,  he  would  have  been  a  power 
long  before  he  was. 

Lowell  understood  that  literature  was 
not  merely  the  expression  of  the  artist 
or  the  means  of  communication  of  the 
thinker  any  more  than  the  privilege  of  a 
mandarin  caste  or  the  respectable  ne 
cessity  of  a  growing  nation.  He  felt  that 
it  was  a  force  in  the  world  and  an  im 
mense  one,  and  he  did  his  best  to  use  it. 
Not  always  purposely  and  consciously; 
his  own  especial  desire  was  to  sit  in  his 
study  or  outdoors  about  the  house,  and 
write  poetry  of  lofty  aspiration  and 
imaginative  insight  and  whimsical  fancy. 
But,  fortunately,  he  was  not  able  to  con 
fine  himself  to  this  occupation :  he  could 


116  JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL 
not  resist  the  feeling  that  he  had  some 
thing  more  to  do  in  the  world.  This 
something  he  could  accomplish  by  no 
other  means  than  the  spoken  and  written 
word.  Other  men  work  with  their 
hands,  or  plan  work  for  inferiors,  or 
fight,  or  sail  ships,  or  make  shoes,  or 
conceive  foreign  policies  for  the  nation. 
There  are  unnumbered  ways  whereby 
people  bring  things  to  pass.  With 
Lowell,  literature,  too,  became  an  active 
force,  not  only  accomplishing  things 
itself,  but  taking  also  its  place  in  the 
things  accomplished  by  the  nation.  So 
Lowell  kept  in  the  current  of  events,  and 
did  what  he  could.  He  was  willing  to 
use  any  good  means  that  circumstances 
put  into  his  hand.  At  first  he  wrote 
poems,  then  newspaper  articles,  then 
poems  again  where  he  made  his  first 
great  hit,  then  lectures  where  he  made 
his  second  hit.  Then  he  did  editorial 
work,  and  took  to  political  leaders. 
Then  he  turned  to  poetry  again,  and 


JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL  117 
then  to  fresh  forms.  And  by  this  time 
he  had  been  at  work  for  a  generation ; 
and  people  knew  that  here  was  a  man 
who  was  one  of  the  leaders  of  America, 
one  who  understood  America,  and  who 
had  a  keen  eye  ont  ahead  for  her  future, 
and  who  used  all  the  talents  that  had 
been  intrusted  to  him  for  her  use  and 
special  behoof.  He  thus  became,  if  not 
ruler  over  ten  cities,  at  least  one  of  the 
de  facto  joint- rulers  over  a  greater  num 
ber  of  commonwealths. 

In  other  words,  Lowell  was  one  of  the 
men  who  helped  to  shape  the  destiny  of 
America ;  and  his  means  was  literature. 
And  this  people  recognized,  on  the 
whole  ;  and,  although  he  could  not  write 
poems  like  Longfellow,  and  although  he 
had  no  philosophy  like  that  of  Emerson, 
they  regarded  him  yet  as  the  foremost 
figure  in  literature  because  he  had  been 
a  worker  to  such  real  advantage. 

It  does  not  follow  from  this  that  every 
representative  man  of  letters  is  a  man 


118  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL 
who  uses  letters  as  a  practical  force. 
Irving  was  not,  and  yet  he  was  quite  as 
representative  a  man  of  letters  of  his 
own  time  as  Lowell  was  of  his.  Irving 
is  the  representative  of  the  first  genera 
tion  of  American  literature,  say  from 
1810-1840 ;  Lowell,  of  the  second,  say 
1840- -1870.  The  two  periods  were  very 
different.  The  one  called  for  culture, 
the  other  for  action.  Irving  was  a  man 
who  saw  everything  as  literature,  and 
this  was  what  was  wanted  in  a  nation 
that  was  doing  little  more  than  settling 
down  and  in  a  manner  forming  itself. 
Lowell,  on  the  other  hand,  did  not  see 
everything  as  literature.  He  saw  litera 
ture  itself  as  an  impulse  to  action  ;  and, 
as  action  was  called  for  by  the  time,  he 
made  literature  his  means  rather  than 
his  end. 

In  his  generation,  literature  was  dis 
tinctively  a  force  for  action.  Not  that 
it  was  nothing  else :  it  was,  as  it  has 
often  been,  on  the  whole  didactic,  as  in 


JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL  119 
" Brahma/7  for  instance;  it  probed  the 
depths  of  life,  as  in  The  Scarlet  Letter ; 
it  was  frankly  and  merely  beautiful,  as 
in  " Annabel  Lee"  or  "Ulalume77  ;  it 
was  a  charming  relaxation  after  the 
burden  and  heat  of  the  day,  as  in  Hia 
watha.  Even  with  Lowell  himself,  it 
was  all  these  things  to  a  greater  or  less 
degree  in  "Sir  Launfal,"  " The  Cathe 
dral/7  "A  Legend  of  Brittany,77  "The 
Courtin7.77  But  in  those  years  litera 
ture  was  also  and  especially  a  national 
force,  so  that  the  historian,  who  says 
nothing  of  "mere  literature77  as  such, 
will  probably  take  account  of  The  Blglow 
Papers,  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin,  "Ichabod," 
and  (I  like  to  think)  The  Man  without  a 
Country. 

In  our  own  time  literature  is  hardly 
such  a  force.  What  happens  under  our 
eyes  is  hard  to  see  clearly.  But  it  seems, 
on  the  whole,  as  if  we  had  neither 
Irving7 s  object  especially  in  view,  nor 
Lowell7s.  We  have  got  perfectly  used 


120  JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL 
to  looking  at  everything  as  literature,  so 
that  any  five  years'  graduate  can  turn 
out  as  good  literature  as  you  need  right 
from  the  topics  of  the  day.  Nor  is  it  so 
particularly  necessary  to  use  literature 
as  a  means  of  bringing  things  to  pass. 
The  people  who  wish  to  do  anything 
nowadays  are  using  means  which,  for 
the  time  being,  are  infinitely  more 
powerful.  Literature  is  now  serving  a 
wholly  different  purpose,  so  far  as  it  is 
serious  :  it  is  serving  as  an  interpreter  of 
the  secret  of  life, — a  matter  in  which  we 
have  become  much  interested.  This  was 
a  matter  in  which  the  preceding  genera 
tion  was  not  as  much  concerned  as  we 
are,  and  hence  neither  the  work  of 
Irving  nor  of  Lowell  intrinsically  can 
hold  the  same  place  for  us  that  it  held 
in  their  own  day.  They  were  particu 
larly  and  pre-eminently  men  of  letters  of 
their  own  time. 

But  we  need  not  feel    that    because 
Lowell  is  a  figure  of  a  past  generation 


JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL      121 

that  he  has  nothing  to  say  to  us.  It  is 
true  that  directly  he  has  not  very  much. 
The  man  who  is  more  or  less  influenced 
by  the  present  currents  of  thought  and 
feeling  has  not  very  much  real  and  direct 
interest  in  Lowell's  work  as  literature. 
A  smile  or  two  over  The  Biglow  Papers, 
a  thrill  over  the  "  Commemoration  Ode," 
half  a  dozen  familiar  quotations,  a  num 
ber  of  good  bits  of  criticism  tucked  up  in 
capital  figures,  these  are  the  residuum  of 
a  reading  of  Lowell  on  the  average  reader 
who  knows  and  cares  for  the  life  and  lit 
erature  of  the  present.  But  —  and  the 
u  but ?  ?  is  a  large  one  —  any  one  who  will 
appreciate  Lowell  as  he  himself  used  to 
appreciate  his  predecessors,  will  gain 
from  LowelFs  collected  work,  not  the 
supreme  aesthetic  pleasure  that  we  get 
only  from  the  art  of  our  own  time,  the 
few  great  geniuses  of  all  time,  and  the 
few  curious  exceptions  that  each  one  of 
us  insists  on  making  in  the  deadening 
judgment  of  the  years, — not  that,  but  a 


122      JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL 

consciousness  of  the  vigor  and  power  of 
the  thinking  and  feeling  man  as  a  work 
ing  element  in  society.  This  is  a  thing 
that  we  cannot  easily  get  from  any  au 
thor  of  our  own  race  and  generation,  be 
cause  we  have  no  such  man  to-day  as 
Lowell.  It  is  something  that  we  cannot 
get  so  easily  from  the  work  of  men  of 
any  other  nation,  for  such  authors  deal 
always  with  a  civilization  that  is  not  our 
own.  Lowell  was  essentially  an  Ameri 
can. 

An  understanding  of  the  power  of  let 
ters  as  a  factor  in  the  world's  work,  that 
is  what  we  get  from  Lowell.  It  is  some 
thing  that  we  cannot  get  from  Emerson 
or  Longfellow  or  Hawthorne.  To  the 
same  degree  we  cannot  get  it  from  others 
who  worked  along  with  Lowell,  from 
Mrs.  Stowe  or  Whittier,  because  no 
other  writer  of  his  time  used  the  power 
of  literature  so  broadly  and  so.  finely  as 
did  he.  He  was  the  personification  of 
letters  in  life. 


JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL  123 
And  this  feeling  is  something  that  we 
can  never  do  without.  Literature  is 
Protean,  now  one  thing  and  now  an 
other.  So  soon  as  we  begin  to  think  of 
it  as  something  definite,  something  fixed, 
it  begins  to  harden  :  instead  of  letters  in 
any  broad  sense,  we  have  hieratic  writ 
ing.  Lowell  himself  saw  literature  dif 
ferently  at  different  times.  But  the 
main  tendency  of  his  own  activity  made 
literature  a  force  in  the  world.  When 
we  forget  that  literature  is  a  force  in  the 
world,  we  close  our  eyes  to  the  facts. 
Lowell  may  well  stand  even  in  times 
whose  tendencies  are  different  from  the 
tendencies  of  his  own  time :  he  will  al 
ways  awaken,  stimulate,  and  vivify. 


BIBLIOGEAPHY. 

The  first  books  to  read,  if  you  wish 
to  know  something  of  Lowell,  are  his 
own  writings.  The  "Standard  Library 
Edition"  is  in  eleven  volumes,  ten  re 
vised  by  himself,  the  other  by  Pro 
fessor  Norton.  This  edition  contains 
all  of  Lowell's  work  that  he  wished  to 
preserve.  It  omits  a  number  of  his 
early  poems,  his  articles  for  the  Boston 
Miscellany,  u  Conversations  on  Some  of 
the  Old  Poets,"  the  Lowell  Lectures 
of  1855,  and  a  greater  number  of  his 
periodical  contributions. 

There  is  so  far  no  full  life  of  Lowell. 
There  are,  however,  several  books  that 
go  far  toward  enabling  us  to  form  our 
own  opinions.  The  following  list  of 
books  will  amply  serve  even  the  most 
careful  reader :  — 

I.  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL:  A  BIO 
GRAPHICAL  STUDY.  By  F.  H.  Under 
wood.  (Boston,  1882 :  J.  E.  Osgood  & 


BIBLIOGEAPHY  125 

Co.)  Worth  reading,  although  written 
during  LowelFs  lifetime,  and  conse 
quently  incomplete  as  a  life-study. 

II.  POETS  OF  AMERICA.    (Boston,  1885 : 
Houghton,  Mifflin  &  Co. )     The  essay  on 
Lowell  is  by  Edmund  Clarence  Stedman, 
and  is  a  very  excellent  critical  study. 

III.  LATEST  LITERARY  AND  POLITICAL 
ADDRESSES  OF  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL. 
Edited  by  Professor  Charles  Eliot  Nor 
ton.     (Boston,  1892  :   Houghton,  Mifflin 
&Co.) 

IV.  THE   OLD  ENGLISH  DRAMATISTS. 
By    James    Eussell     Lowell.        Edited 
by  Professor  Norton.      (Boston,    1892: 
Houghton,  Mifflin  &  Co. ) 

V.  THE  POET  AND  THE  MAN  :  EECOL- 

LECTIONS  AND  APPRECIATIONS  OF  JAMES 

EUSSELL  LOWELL.  By  F.  H.  Under 
wood.  (Boston,  1893:  Lee  &  Shep- 
ard.)  Mr.  Underwood  was  very  inti 
mate  with  Lowell  for  many  years,  espe- 


126  BIBLIOGEAPHY 

cially  during  those  following  the  found 
ing  of  the  Atlantic  Monthly,  and  this  ap 
preciation  is  on  that  account  of  great 
value.  The  book  is,  of  course,  bio- 
graphically  more  complete  than  number 
one  on  this  list,  by  the  same  author, 
having  been  written  at  a  much  later 
date,  and  after  the  death  of  Lowell. 

VI.  JAMES  EUSSELL  LOWELL  :  AN  AD 
DRESS.       By    George    William    Curtis. 
(New  York,  1893  :  Harper  &  Brothers.) 
Curtis  was  also  an  intimate  friend  of 
Lowell.     This  address,  though  short,  is 
of  value,  not  only  from  the  writer's  op 
portunity  to  know,  but  from  his  clear 
judgment. 

VII.  THE  LETTERS  OF  JAMES  EUSSELL 
LOWELL.     Edited  by  Charles  Eliot  Nor 
ton.     Two  volumes.     (New  York,  1894 : 
Harper  &  Brothers.)      After   LowelPs 
published  Works,  this  is  the  book  most 
necessary  to  a  knowledge  of  him.     It 
does  not  give  so  good  an  idea  of  his  out- 


BIBLIOGEAPHY  127 

ward  life  as  it  does  of  his  inner  life  of 
thought  and  feeling.  Professor  Norton, 
one  of  Lowell's  most  intimate  friends 
and  his  literary  associate  and  executor, 
has  added  enough  facts  to  enable  one  to 
read  it  with  understanding. 

VIII.  AN  INTRODUCTION  TO  THE  STUDY 
OF  AMERICAN  LITERATURE.     By  Bran- 
der    Matthews.        (New    York,     1896: 
American  Book  Company. )     Contains  a 
clear  and  valuable  estimate  of  Lowell. 

IX.  Volume  XVI.  of  the  LIBRARY  OF 
THE  WORLD'S  BEST  LITERATURE.     Ed 
ited  by  Charles  Dudley  Warner.     (New 
York,  1897  :   Magazine  Publishing  Com 
pany.)     Contains  also  a  good  criticism 
of  Lowell. 

X.  AMERICAN  LITERATURE.     By  C.  F. 
Kichardson.       (New  York,  1898  :   G.  P. 
Putnam's  Sons.)     This  contains  a  short 
account  of  Lowell  and  is  a  good  specimen 
of  work  of  its  class. 


128  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

XI.  AMERICAN  BOOKMEN.     By  M.  A. 
De  Wolfe    Howe.      (New    York,    1898: 
Dodd,  Mead  &  Co. )     Gives  also  a  clear, 
brief  critical  estimate  of  the  poet,  much 
like  number  six,  but  with  more  illustra 
tion  by  portrait  and  fac-simile. 

XII.  JAMES  BUSSELL  LOWELL  AND  HIS 
FRIENDS.      By  Edward   Everett  Hale. 
(Boston,    1899:     Houghton,    Mifflin    & 
Co.)     This  is  not  exactly  a  life.     It  is 
more  a  series  of  reminiscences,  of  me 
moirs  of  the  time.     Dr.  Hale  was  in  the 
class  after  Lowell  at  Harvard,  but  be 
came  a  close  friend  of  his.     His  own  life 
in  so  many  places  crossed  or  paralleled 
that  of  Lowell,  and  his  connections  reach 
so  widely  into  the  field  of  Lowell's  ac 
tivity,  that  he  has  been  able  to  collect 
an  immense  amount  of  most  interesting 
illustration  of  our  subject,  besides  sup 
plying  the  standpoint  of  one  at  once  a 
contemporary  of  Lowell  and  of  ourselves. 

TB" 
"  or  THE 

UNIVERSITY 


THE  BEACON   BIOGRAPHIES. 

M.  A.  DEWOLFE  HOWE,  Editor. 

The  aim  of  this  series  is  to  furnish  brief,  readable,  and 
authentic  accounts  of  the  lives  of  those  Americans  whose 
personalities  have  impressed  themselves  most  deeply  on  the 
character  and  history  of  their  country.  On  account  of  the 
length  of  the  more  formal  lives,  often  running  into  large 
volumes,  the  average  busy  man  and  woman  have  not  the 
time  or  hardly  the  inclination  to  acquaint  themselves  with 
American  biography.  In  the  present  series  everything  that 
such  a  reader  would  ordinarily  care  to  know  is  given  by 
writers  of  special  competence,  who  possess  in  full  measure 
the  best  contemporary  point  of  view.  Each  volume  is 
equipped  with  a  frontispiece  portrait,  a  calendar  of  important 
dates,  and  a  brief  bibliography  for  further  reading.  Finally, 
the  volumes  are  printed  in  a  form  convenient  for  reading 
and  for  carrying  handily  in  the  pocket. 

The  following  volumes  are  the  first  issued  :  — 
PHILLIPS  BROOKS,  by  the  EDITOR. 
DAVID  G.  FARRAGUT,  by  JAMES  BARNES. 
ROBERT  E.  LEE,  by  W.  P.  TRENT. 
JAMES    RUSSELL    LOWELL,    by   EDWARD   EVERETT 

HALE,  JR. 
DANIEL  WEBSTER,  by  NORMAN  HAPGOOD. 

The  following  are  among  those  in  preparation  :  — 
JOHN  JAMES  AUDUBON,  by  JOHN  BURROUGHS. 
EDWIN  BOOTH,  by  CHARLES  TOWNSEND  COPELAND. 
AARON  BURR,  by  HENRY  CHILDS  MERWIN. 
JAMES  FENIMORE    COOPER,  by  W.    B.    SHUBRICC 

CLYMER. 
BENJAMIN  FRANKLIN,  by  LINDSAY  SWIFT. 

SMALL,  MAYNARD  &  COMPANY,  Publishers, 
6  BEACON  STREET,  BOSTON. 


14  DAY  USE 

TURN  TO  DESK  FROM  WHICHBORROWED 

LOAN  DEPT. 

his  book  is  due  on  the  last  date  stamped  below,  or 

on  the  date  to  which  renewed. 
Renewed  books  are  subject  to  immediate  recall. 


eOct'59WW 


nr.T  10 


